


State Lines and Starry Eyes

by diapason



Series: dnf [3]
Category: Minecraft (Video Game), Video Blogging RPF
Genre: Fluff, Friends to Lovers, Hot Weather, Idiots in Love, Karaoke, Long drives, M/M, Mutual Pining, Road Trips, Sightseeing, Slow Burn, Sunsets, and venting to his second best friend about his crush late at night, but NOT like heat waves i promise this is only gonna end in a kiss nothin smutty, dream is a himbo, gas stations, george is a baby and a fool, going to see sapnap!, i had to update that tag now lmanberg is gone ;-;, lol, more tags later if i think of them, no beta we die like l'manberg
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-20
Updated: 2021-01-22
Packaged: 2021-03-10 00:28:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 27,053
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27644837
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/diapason/pseuds/diapason
Summary: "Well anyway, who cares, because I -" he turned to face George again, locking him in his gaze once more "- have had a super fucking awesome idea.""What." George could already feel a smile growing on his face."Roadddd tripppp!"--George is stuck in a cycle of falling too hard and having Dream catch him when he lands flat on his face. Getting out of the rut sounds easy enough - they'll just drive to visit Sapnap in Texas for a couple of days!Alone. Together. Just the two of them. For a couple of days.What could possibly arise from that?
Relationships: Clay | Dream & GeorgeNotFound & Sapnap (Video Blogging RPF), Clay | Dream & GeorgeNotFound (Video Blogging RPF), Clay | Dream & Sapnap (Video Blogging RPF), Clay | Dream/GeorgeNotFound (Video Blogging RPF), GeorgeNotFound & Darryl Noveschosch
Series: dnf [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2159853
Comments: 185
Kudos: 331





	1. The Proposal

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Fasten Your Seatbelts](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4693460) by [orphan_account](https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account). 



> WELCOME TO THE SHOW
> 
> Clichés abound, you have been warned!
> 
> Updates every Friday or you have legal permission to beat me with a mallet because I have a literal seven chapter headstart and I will have reeeally fallen off the wagon if this fic is never finished.
> 
> Obviously no intent to comment on the relationship status of the real people who inspired this work of fiction! I will remove if Dream Team asks us to stop. CCs you like, CAN read this if you want to, but i don't know why you would lol

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A seed is planted.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> strapped in? no arms and legs outside the vehicle? good then let's begin

_Incoming call from dreamy boy_

Click.

"Dream?"

"George. I got your text. Are you -"

"Fine, I'm fine, everything's-" His voice cracked traitorously "- okay. I just wanted you to know first."

"Come on, Gee, you don't sound okay. Getting cheated on is never fun, you know that. It's totally cool if you need to talk; you know you can trust me."

"I do. I do. And it's fine! I'm getting over it, don't worry about me. I just wanted..."

He hung up.

He just wanted... what? Comfort? The kind of insight only Dream, who knew George better than George knew himself, could provide? To hear his best friend's voice, as if that would make it okay?

He still felt the pain of being dumped by Lauren like a punch to the gut. This probably had a lot to do with the fact that she actually had punched him in the gut. When he walked into his apartment to find her on top of a guy they'd both known since before they even dated, since George had arrived at American high school five years ago, it was all he could do to tell her to get the fuck out between the other guy's yelling that he seriously had no idea she was taken and her screaming at him that it was his fault for not being a good enough boyfriend, if he had treated her better she wouldn't have been forced to do this, you know you're an asshole, George.

And he did - but not for the cheating. He was an arsehole for dragging Dream into things when he had nothing to do with Lauren and George's (now apparently well and truly dead) relationship. He never wanted to bother Dream with his problems anyway, even though he knew his best friend was always willing to listen and support him from years of experience. It just felt like it wasn't worth Dream's time. So all he had said was _hey lauren cheated on me so i dumped her_ ; short and sweet, easy to reply to with a similarly casual reply. He'd honestly been expecting little more than an "oof" in response; the call caught him off guard.

What shocked him, though, was the newly crescendoing noise of a car engine pulling up outside. He stood up from the sofa and peeked through the still-drawn blinds to see Dream's car sitting in the visitors' parking bay.

"You didn't..."

He had. Clay Hudson stepped out of the car with purpose; George caught a flash of his dark, furrowed brows under curly blonde hair and a green hood as he darted through the rain to the apartment stairwell and disappeared out of eyeshot. He'd come to check on George.

He unconsciously ruffled his hair and straightened his shirt up in the window's reflection in the seconds before his buzzer sounded; then he pulled the door open, greeted by the sight of the only person he knew he could always rely on, especially at a time like this.

"Dream!" He tried to affect excitement in his voice, but again it cracked, and he felt tears sting below his eyes, threatening to spill over. Taking a deep breath, he asked more carefully, "why are you here?"

"You're going through a breakup, Georgie. Can't a man be there for his bro in times of crisis like these?" There was sincerity behind the laughter; both coaxed George's own lips into twitching upwards.

"Come in, jesus, it's raining pretty hard out there." He gestured to his own soaked coat from earlier, its moisture seeping into the sofa from where he had thrown it while he sat and processed what the fuck had just happened earlier. Dream nodded and, carefully, moved his jacket to the hanger on George's bedroom door. Then he turned around, stone cold green eyes meeting George's, and put his hands on his hips.

"Talk to me."

"... Okay."

They stood like that for a couple of beats, neither party making a move from his position by the door, eye contact piercing directly into George's soul as he waited for Dream to maybe ask a question. Nothing came out.

Eventually Dream won the battle of wits and George crumpled, leaning back into the front door and pushing it locked. "She was, uh. Fucking Schlatt."

"What? Jschlatt, that Schlatt?"

"Do we know another Schlatt?"

"I don't know," muttered Clay, "I've heard of two Hbombs, it could happen -"

"Yes, Jschlatt," George huffed. "He swore he had no idea she wasn't single."

"Yeah, she didn't exactly... talk about you much. Like, ever."

"But you hate Schlatt anyway, right?"

"Schlatt's not the issue here. What did you say to Lauren when you got there?"

"Not a lot. Mainly just, get out of my house."

"Really?" He started moving towards the sofa, eyes still locked on George. That stare felt like an honest-to-god lasso of truth sometimes, the way Dream could make the whole story spill out of him.

"She did most of the talking, honestly. It wasn't like it was anything I didn't already know; you know Lauren, everything is my fault with her."

"Your-" Dream sharply exhaled, his composure momentarily giving way to shock, "your _fault_? Georgie, SHE cheated on YOU. Don't you think for a fucking _second_ that ANY of that is your fault."

"I mean," he broke the eye contact, embarrassed, and started watching one raindrop among many trail down the windowpane, "she's always telling me how I should have done better. This is no different."

"Come sit."

He did. Now he was watching the clock on the wall, hands fidgeting.

"Look at me, George," Clay said, quieter, and he did. "Cheaters are the only people who need to do better when they cheat. You did nothing wrong."

He closed his eyes, swallowing to hold back fresh tears. "Is... Is it not my fault for loving her in the first place? I mean, I knew she'd cheated before. I should have realised I wasn't any different, right?"

"George..." Clay's voice was soft. "You may be a dumbass and a hopeless romantic, but that doesn't make you wrong for falling in love."

He opened his eyes into Clay's again wordlessly. He hoped the look on his face said everything it needed to, because one word and he'd be crying for real, and he didn't need to worry Dream any more than he already was.

Thankfully, it seemed like it did, because he just said quietly, "Love is never wrong, George," and motioned for him to come closer. George silently inched up the sofa towards Clay's warmth and laid his head into the familiar position of the bend of his arm the way he always did on nights like these. And, the way Dream always did, he slapped a comforting arm around George's shoulder, his other hand feeling for the remote and turning on the TV on the other side of the room.

_I've got to move on and be who I am / I just don't belong here, I hope you understand_

"What the fuck?" Dream's incredulity slowly morphed into laughter. "Were you watching the Disney channel?"

"No!" George protested, honestly.

Dream hesitated, and then - "Lauren was watching the Disney channel??"

"I don't think so -"

"Was she watching it while..."

They both allowed a moment for the image to sink into their minds (albeit a little more vividly for George) as Zac Efron began to sing along with his love interest on screen.

"I mean," Dream finally recovered, "were they fucking to the dulcet tones of a High School Musical marathon?"

That finally broke George. He snorted, then he laughed, and then he finally, finally cried, tears and snot making a huge mess of Dream's clothes. He shook with similarly messy emotions, every second of the past half hour that he had previously been held back by a desperate need not to inconvenience Dream finally breaking free of the dam that held them. Dream's grip around his side tightened protectively, and though George couldn't see for tears, he knew Dream wasn't annoyed with him for once, just waiting patiently for him to get over himself.

He pulled back as soon as he could think straight enough to realise that he was ruining Dream's favourite hoodie, the one he wore every day until it stank (or, he supposed in this case, got George mucus all up in it). "I'm so sorry, Dream - your hoodie -" he said shakily; Dream's response was to simply and silently pull him back into their embrace. What a wonderful guy. And somehow only George had managed to get him to like him as much as he liked Dream. The guy had a lot of friends, sure, but as long as they'd attended high school together it had always been him and Dream against the world, and that had hardly changed now they were out in the working world.

God, twenty years old, crying like a baby over a girl he'd only dated for, what was it, two months? He wished he wasn't like this.

"How are you doing, Gee?"

George stared into the hoodie fabric as he worked on an answer. "I... really don't know."

"Do you still feel like it's your fault?"

"Not... no, not really. Not for this. I guess it's just who I am. I fall hard every time and she's never there to catch me at the end, it must be a me problem if this happens every time, right?"

"Georgie, you can't help who you are," Dream muttered reassuringly, moving his hand up to play with George's hair in the way that seemed to help him more than it helped George most of the time. "You're just a lover, that's all."

"Sometimes I wish I wasn't," he said, self-consciously noting he sounded a little too much like a pouting toddler.

"What do you mean?"

"I don't know, I guess... I wish I could be someone else. Maybe get away from it all, even just for a little while. It's stupid, I'm sorry -"

"No, no, no, George, it's not stupid! I get it. Being here probably isn't helping your mental state right now, is it, huh? And besides, getting away from it all sounds like a... pretty good plan..." He trailed off, checking his phone suddenly. George took that to mean the conversation was over, and reluctantly pulled away from his comfortable friend.

_We might find our place in this world some day / But at least for now, I gotta go my own way_

"Give me that." George reached over Dream's legs to the remote, flipping down a few more kids' channels before finally turning the damn thing off altogether. "Thank god I'm not paying for a TV license in this country, it would _not_ be worth it."

"TV license?" Dream asked absently.

"Oh, yeah, in the UK they make you pay for telly privileges on top of broadband. But, obviously, Netflix and everything, most young'uns aren't buying it these days."

"That sounds dumb."

"I don't know, it's just how it works."

"Well anyway, who cares, because I -" he turned to face George again, locking him in his gaze once more "- have had a super fucking awesome idea."

"What." He could already feel a smile growing on his face.

"Roadddd tripppp!" Dream enthused.

"... Road trip?"

"Road trip," he repeated confidently. "Think about it. You haven't really left the state since you moved here, right? You've been a regular old Florida Man all this time. See, George, you haven't had the chance to experience the glory of the United States - all the shitty southern tourist traps, the roadside attractions, the many wonders of the continental U.S. of A! And I could take you there, George. We could hop in my car and just... drive. Doesn't that sound awesome?"

George paused.

"No."

"No?! Aw, come on, why?"

"Well, first of all -" he stood up, starting to pace "- I don't even know where we're headed. Are you planning to take us in a big circle?"

"No, you idiot, I've thought of this. Sap lives in Austin, right?" Dream's previous best friend, who had been unfortunately separated from them about a year into George's life in America due to family issues, was currently attending community college in his new home state, according to what he heard in their almost-weekly Minecraft and Skype sessions together. Dream had really missed Nick, a lot more than George was even sure he knew, and it would be awesome to see the guy again in person now that they weren't all spotty teenagers any more. "I just texted him and he's a hundred and ten percent down for a reunion. He said, uh... He said it'll be great to see us."

"Awesome - but second of all, what would we even do? Just drive to Texas? I don't even know how long that would take, especially coming out of this little appendix of a state. It'd be like doing Cornwall to Manchester or something, but like a million times longer."

"You're not listening, Georgie, I said sightseeing. We'll see the coolest things the Gulf Coast has to offer, maybe take a detour down to New Orleans in Louisiana; there's gotta be some national parks we can visit, right? We could see the largest ball of twine or something stupid like that!" Dream busied himself in his phone again as George continued to pace.

"What would you do about leaving work behind?"

"I'm basically a freelancer, they can deal with making a few phone calls if they need me. I'll take my vacation."

"For the year?" And spend it on... him?

"Sure. Aw, shit, the largest ball of twine is way out in Kansas, we'd have to go days out of the way."

"And most importantly, Dream -" he looked up "- how am I meant to pay you for all this?"

"What?" Dream almost laughed.

"Petrol, places to sleep, food, whatever else we might want to buy - I'm... between jobs right now, you know that."

"So?"

"Well, how am I supposed to pay you back?"

"Pay me back?"

"Yes!"

"Georgie, you're my best friend, you don't have to pay me a dime."

"But -" that felt wrong, unfair, exploitative. He was already such a drain on Dream emotionally, he didn't have to add any financial baggage to the mix.

"George. Honey. Bro. I will pay for you to have a good fucking time. If you feel that bad you can pay me back when you actually have a job, but I literally do not care about this money. We're going on a god damn road trip to hang out with our old buddy Sapnap, and it's gonna be awesome, and you're gonna love it."

Dream fixed him with that stare again.

"Okay?"

"Fine," George relented, and received a whoop from Dream in response. "So what now?"

"I'm gonna go home and pack, and I suggest you do the same, because I'm gonna be back outside your door tomorrow morning ready to go."

"Go where first?"

"Wherever Google Maps takes us!" George watched as Dream stood up and practically jumped past him to get back into his coat. "It's gonna be awesome, George. Seriously."

And before he knew it, George was alone again - except this time, it didn't feel quite so bad.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ok so that was just the setup it gets going next chapter i promise (you'll have to subscribe to get to the good stuff!)


	2. Fuel Is Important, Kids

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Pancakes, popcorn, and personal information.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> welcome back to another episode of two dumbasses one car!
> 
> im moving "fridays" to "friday mornings" because the tag's slower in the morning so i get more ✨exposure✨
> 
> anyway bring on day one

HONK.

George stirred in his bed, but only a little. That wasn't for him, after all.

HOOOOOOONK HONK.

Nobody ever came calling for George first thing in the morning any more.

HONKHONKHONKHONKHOONK.

Wait, shit, Dream -

_georgy boy: i just woke ulp_   
_georgy boy: sorry_

The honking ceased long enough for George to rub the sleep out of his eyes and get dressed in his pre-laid-out clothes. (He silently sent thanks and love to himself from last night for thinking ahead like that; in this state it would be hard enough to brush his teeth, let alone root through the wardrobe for a sensible outfit.) All the while, Dream continued to pester him with little buzzes from his phone which still lay on the bed and he didn't want to pick up.

_dreamy boy: GEORGIO!_   
_dreamy boy: Good morning!!_   
_dreamy boy: I hope you slept well ^-^_   
_dreamy boy: I know I did, gotta be well rested for the road!_   
_dreamy boy: Hope you're ignoring me because you're super busy getting ready and that you didn't die xD_   
_dreamy boy: But in the case of the former, I'll be seeing you soon~_

Halfway through squeezing out his toothpaste, George stopped.

_georgy boy: what are we doing for breakfast_

_dreamy boy: I was thinking IHOP!_

_georgy boy: i like your thinking_

_dreamy boy: ^-^_

He went ahead with a quick sweep of the mouth (he could be hygienic even if the rest of his life was a disaster) and wrapped the brush up to throw it in his suitcase on top of all his jeans and underwear, a generous sprinkling of shirts and socks, a spare hoodie, and a couple of trinkets he didn't really want to leave at home while they drove across four consecutive state lines. The road trip was pretty much a go, then, he thought, patting down his jacket to make sure everything he needed was in the pockets. Time to say goodbye.

"Um." It felt a lot less awkward in his head. "Goodbye, room. You have... a lot of history. Some of it, I hope I never find out about. Some of it I hope I'll forget about by the time I get back. Er... Don't start moulding while I'm gone, I won't be here to call the landlord."

A less than optimally sentimental goodbye, but Dream had always been the one who was good with words.

Speaking of Dream...

_dreamy boy: Hurry up!_   
_dreamy boy: I've just been sitting here trying to reach your complex Wi-Fi this whole time._   
_dreamy boy: Do you have data for the road?_

With difficulty, George remembered the details of his contract as he hopped around the room pulling his soon-to-be-only pair of trainers on.

_georgy boy: only a gig lmao_   
_georgy boy: i always use wifi so_   
_georgy boy: might as well be cheap wherever i can_

Finally, he zipped up his suitcase and, leaning on its outstretched handle in the doorway, took one last look over the room that was still packed full of memories even if he'd stripped it of a lot of other things. Would he miss it? Absolutely. Would he be glad to get away from it for a while? Also very much so. Did life in a car with Dream for the next however long appeal to him more than his familiar bed?

Hell yes it did.

On that final note, he locked the door and headed for the staircase, hands reflexively feeling through his pockets for everything he needed to bring. Phone keys wallet, of course, and he'd packed a granola bar just in case they ran rapidly out of food options. Goodbye, stairwell that always smelled like one or the other kind of smoke. Will _not_ be missing you.

HOOONK.

"Dream!" George chastised as he pulled open the car door to take his place on the passenger side of his best friend's ride. "I heard you the first fifty times!"

"What can I say, man? I'm just impatient to see you," smirked Dream, in that way where George could never tell how far he was kidding. That might be mostly to do with his own perception, though.

"So do you have a plan for the day?"

"Well, the main objective is getting out of Florida, so we're gonna go to IHOP, stop at a gas station for some fuel -"

"Your tank is pretty full," noted George from his observation of the dashboard.

"No, people fuel, dumbass!" he smiled - "and then we're basically gonna see where the road north leads us, and if you spot a sign you're interested in, holler and we go there."

"And that's it?"

"That is the entire plan," Dream confirmed as he started up the car to back it out of the parking spot and whisk George away with him.

The first leg of the trip was mostly taken in silence - George didn't often go on drives with anyone but Dream, seeing as he only used to work at the local Whole Foods which was a walk away, and he couldn't afford the car insurance anyway. This meant that whenever Clay dragged him away on another adventure of the day he spent a lot of the time analysing the roads, watching the palm trees flash by (something that had been totally foreign to him when he arrived in this country but which now felt as natural as the sky) and reading all the road signs. Eventually, after ten or so minutes of driving, they spotted the IHOP sign in the middle distance and honed in on it.

He had to admit, in the debate between French crepes and American pancakes, he'd always been on the thick and fluffy side. IHOP took this to its natural extreme by adding every possible American delicacy you could think of on top of their stacks of pancakes and topping it all off with four - yes, four - kinds of syrup on the table for its guests to choose from. They each ordered a stack of three, Dream's with bacon for some godforsaken reason, and ate too much to talk. It was almost mesmerising to watch Dream tuck in to his monstrosity of American cuisine in the ravenous way he did - he'd poured out little wells of three of the syrups (all except blueberry) on the side of the plate and was triple dipping every bite.

"And they say white people have no culture," he quipped, taking a bite of his own food that was simply accompanied by whipped butter and maple syrup. Dream wheezed, and for a second George swore he saw syrup coming out of his best friend's nose. "Really? It wasn't even that funny!"

"You caught me off guard," Dream admitted, voice still pitched up with laughter, "I can't believe you."

When the time came to pay, George had hardly pulled his wallet out of his pocket before Dream was already sliding his card into the reader. "Hey, I was gonna get that!"

"Too late," he shrugged, tapping in his PIN.

"You have to let me pay for something, Dream."

"I don't and I'm not gonna."

"Why not?"

"You don't -" he paused, waiting for the server to leave the table, then resumed hushedly "- you don't have a job, George. How much money do you even have?"

"At least a couple of hundred," he protested. Truthfully, he didn't like to look at his forever dwindling balance unless it was totally necessary. Lauren used to spot him on the shopping and did his laundry, things like that. But Lauren also used to promise him she was faithful only to him.

Push that down, think about it another time.

"Really, bro? I can't be having you pay for shit when you're on a couple hundred dollars, at least, not in good conscience."

"Oh come on, don't worry about me."

"That's literally all I do, George."

_Well, maybe you shouldn't._

They hopped back in the car, the tension in the air quickly becoming apparent to George. As they began driving again, looking out for a gas station, he reached over to turn on the radio.

Oh, god, he hated this song. He fiddled with the frequency, but everything was either another shitty pop song or some boisterous American radio host yelling about a contest or the latest terrible political development. How he longed for the simpler times back home, where the worst thing the people in charge actually proposed doing was funding free healthcare slightly less than the other party would. Eventually he gave up and turned it back off.

"Do you have any music downloaded?"

Dream shook his head, not taking his eyes off the road. "I got Spotify Premium for the ads, but I never actually figured I'd need to download any of them. It's like you said, I'm always Wi-Fi, I never really cared about it."

Damn it.

George went back to silently watching out the window until they finally pulled into the petrol station. There he and Dream briefly split off as they wandered the aisles of the store, looking for snacks to keep them going on their pilgrimage. George eagerly sought the crisp aisle, hoping to find something good for their travels - but the shelves were disappointingly stocked with Lay's (or discount Walkers' as he called them) and weird off-brand maize-based snacks, as so many American junk foods were so often composed. He skimmed over anything with the word 'corn' on the front and ended up ruling out most of the contents of the shelf. He'd make Dream decide. Then he moved on to the cold drinks, where thankfully he recognised everything but a couple of weird energy drinks and their fermented yogurt drink section over in the corner (did people really drink those?) He picked up a Coke to be safe - then reconsidered, and picked up a Diet Coke, because it was twelve cents cheaper. There really wasn't much else to the place unless you needed batteries or something obscure like that; this really did feel like the last stop before the road to nowhere.

"Picked up anything good?"

"Just this." He brandished his soft drink.

"Diet Coke? You're already tiny enough, George, you need your full fat soda to grow up big and strong."

"Hey, I'm allowed to be health-conscious if I want to be."

Dream muttered, "If you really wanted to be health-conscious, you'd come to the gym with me -"

"Hey, I couldn't decide on a packet of crisps, will you pick me something?"

"Why do you still say 'crisps' like that? You've been here long enough, you know the right way to say it."

"The right way? Shut up, you twat." George stifled laughter at his best friend's mock woundedness.

"I'll pick a bag of CHIPS for you, Georgie-boy, don't you worry your little head about that. Let me see..."

They rounded the corner, and Dream seemed similarly disrupted by the lack of interesting options to choose from. He crouched slightly and leaned into the field of processed corn on the lower two shelves, ignoring the Lay's entirely.

"Ah! Perfect." He pulled a black bag of something George couldn't make out from this distance out from the rows of snacks with a flourish and stowed it neatly under his arm next to his own drink of choice - Mountain Dew. George knew from legend told across the internet that the stuff was radioactive green, so of course it would be Dream's favourite; there were no other green drinks on display. (Except Sprite, maybe, but he was pretty sure that was just yellow. It was lemonade, after all.) Dream plucked something blue from the other end of the crisp display... Cool Ranch Doritos, it looked like.

"A solid choice. What do I get?"

"I'll tell you when I've paid. Hand over the soda," he insisted, arm outstretched.

"Fuck you, it's eighty-seven cents. I can do at least this for myself," George retorted.

"Fine, bitch."

"Wow, why so rude?"

"Wh-" Dream half-wheezed in disbelief, "you started it!"

"Violence is never the answer, Clayton."

"That's not my -" He sighed and shook his head in amused resignation, heading to the till. George followed, sliding in front of him at the last second to claim his spot as the first to check out, for which he received a firm punch in the shoulderblade. It would have knocked him forward into the cashier if he weren't already holding onto the counter to root around for his wallet in his pocket. He steadied himself again once the card was read successfully and kicked blindly behind him, landing a glancing blow to one of Dream's legs exactly as planned. Then, before any further action could be taken to turn this into a full-scale war, he grabbed his drink and half-ran back towards the car. Still unlocked, yay.

Dream was back in less than a minute, and as he flopped back down into the driver's seat George found the black bag from earlier landing squarely in his lap. Over the sounds of the car starting up and the clicking of their seatbelt buckles, he read the label.

"Cheddar popcorn?"

"Yeah."

"They make popcorn with _cheese_ on it?"

"Yeah, dude."

"What kind of abomination against God is that?"

"Trust me. It's amazing."

And, because he did trust Dream, he cautiously popped it open. The cheesy smell hit immediately and he almost coughed as stray cheese particles, practically eagerly, went straight down the back of his throat. "Jesus."

"That always happens, try it."

He pulled the bag apart a little further and grabbed a single kernel, then pushed past his trepidation and chucked it straight in his mouth.

And... yeah, it was amazing.

His next grab brought three, and then six or seven bits of popcorn with them to be consumed - he felt like the wild horse at the start of a teen movie about learning to love and winning the championship with the speed at which he wanted to feed himself. Dream had not been lying at all. This was probably the only thing he wanted to eat for the rest of his life.

"You like it?" Dream chuckled.

"Oh my god, these are awesome," he admitted, mouth still embarrassingly full. "This is my diet now."

He could hear his best friend's smile in his voice as he chastised, "You still have to eat human food, George. You're not getting scurvy on me."

"Nah, scurvy is worth it." He wasn't sure if he'd actually already eaten half the packet or if this brand was just very air-in-bag-heavy, which was worrying either way.

"You idiot," Dream admonished him again.

George grinned over at his friend, who was dutifully watching the road as they drove north. Where were they now? He had no idea; he'd done nothing but piss around in every Geography lesson he'd ever taken, and he wasn't about to start knowing things about the Earth now. The thought of pissing around in lessons made him think of Bad, another friend he hadn't seen since their school days - there actually was no Geography education at the high school they'd attended, a fact George considered exceedingly weird coming from a place where plenty of people took the subject at advanced levels, but he'd met Bad at the back of Social Studies approximately three hours before being introduced to Sapnap and Dream. Their little nickname club was something few were privy to (he'd been very confused when the boy he knew as Darryl was suddenly greeted with shouts of "BAD", like he'd brought something terrible into this world by befriending the new kid) and something he'd always felt a little jealous that he was flat out unable to be a part of, but he supposed missing out on the first eight years of friendship the trio shared made that fair enough. Dream used to joke that he should be "error 404, nickname not found", which they all laughed at, even George himself, although he wasn't quite sure why.

Bad had gone away to university way up at Georgia Tech, and though the foursome had already been down to three at home for a couple of years from Sap's departure, it still stung to see his other good buddy leaving the two of them behind. There were a lot of complicated feelings behind it all he was never sure he wanted to get into. Put simply, it was probably where a lot of his guilt about wasting Dream's time came from - Dream had always felt like a popular kid, even though he only really hung out with the same three kids at school, and George had long ago set upon himself the archetype of loser nerd kid, so he was never quite satisfied with the knowledge that, out of everybody he knew, Dream was choosing to hang out with _him_ just because he wanted to. He didn't know what any of it really meant. Maybe one day he'd make enough money to sort it out in therapy.

Orrrrrr he could call Bad when they settled in that night and talk until he forgot all about it. That sounded like a way better option.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> and we're on our way! (yes i know still not very gay yet it'll pick up i promise)


	3. The Gay Awakens

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Exploring the comedic capacities of a town called Mayo.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> welcome back, folks, its been a long week but here's your regularly scheduled dose of two dumbasses one car, enjoy :)

Before George knew it, they'd been on the road for over four hours and the sun was already sat high in the sky, casting unrealistically tiny shadows on every post they passed. He'd long since lost track of where they were - definitely still Florida, but as they were making no particular effort to rush to their final destination, it was very possible they hadn't even left the main sticky-outy bit of the state. He'd been talking to Dream on and off the entire drive, spitballing the kinds of things they wanted to do on their way - his friend had been very interested in the idea of detouring through Houston to visit the space centre, if all went well. George, on the other hand, was simply interested in trawling Google Maps and looking for the funniest town names to visit; he figured they could take a photo in front of every sign for the memes. He'd thought Dream might be opposed to this given the extra hours it could easily add to their travel time, but instead of shooting George down he'd just sighed, unlocked his phone, and handed it over with the Maps app loading. That had been a while ago, and inbetween stretches of staring out the window for interesting signs, he'd combed almost every inch of what looked like their prospective route, working backwards from Austin.

And, in a stroke of excellent timing, the moment their location marker finally slid into George's selected field of view, he struck gold.

"We HAVE to visit Mayo."

"Mayo?"

"Mayo, Florida, it's so close to us right now, we have to go."

"What's there?"

He tapped the town name as Dream gently steered them around a turn in the road. It zoomed in and the little bio popped up. "Only municipality in Lafayette County... changed its name to Miracle Whip in 2018... There's not a lot to do, but they do have some national parks nearby?"

"Awesome. Are we going the right way?"

"Next left," George filled in, studying the route. This would bring them a little bit closer to the coast - maybe they'd get to have a visit to the beach at some point. "Did you bring anything for the beach?"

"Sure, why?"

"I thought we might pass somewhere nice to stop and get ice cream or something. I don't remember the last time we had a beach day."

"High school for sure - Bad was definitely there with us."

"Right, that must have been the time he lost his shoe in the water -"

"Lost it? George, you _threw_ it in the water and made him swim for it!"

"I have no idea what you're talking about."

"You were on your "crack Bad" kick, trying to make him swear at least once before graduation, I remember this very clearly."

"Oh yeah?" He hadn't even managed it in the end; Bad, very aware of George's intentions the entire time, had steadfastly refused to give in to the taunting and teasing, even on the few occasions Dream had joined in on the efforts. Once, while drunk, Dream had confessed that after graduation Darryl had leaned into his ear at the afterparty and delivered a single solemn f-bomb, just to rub it in George's face that he had stuck it out and George would never get to hear it. This definitely never kept him up at night.

"Absolutely - what about your beach stuff?"

"I... have a towel?"

"Dumbass," smiled Dream.

George ended up holding Clay's phone up at arm's length for him to follow the route to Mayo (he was really about to visit Mayo, Florida!) for the last five or ten minutes of the trek. Eventually a huge water tower peeked up over the horizon at them, simply bearing the giant label "MAYO". Of course, this set them both off laughing, because oh my god, why wouldn't it? They pulled over at the first opportunity for photos.

After realising the tower was at a terrible angle for the front-facing camera, they opted to take turns shooting one another posed under the sacred landmark. Dream, as he usually did in photos, started to cover his face with carefully positioned peace signs, thumbs up and even a finger gun at one point.

"Come on, I can't see you!"

"That's the point, I'm self-conscious," he defended.

"You don't have to post them if you don't want to."

"But how else am I supposed to commemorate this historic moment on our journey together?"

"You could post one of the pictures of me..."

"On my instagram?"

"Sure, why not?"

"I'm not sure what my hundred twenty-four followers would think of that."

"Why? Will they unfollow you if they see you posting this artwork?" he laughed, framing his face with his free hand and pouting dramatically.

He expected to hear Dream laughing along, but his friend seemed almost flustered as he came back for his phone and announced, "Your turn."

In his own poses he tried to be a little stupid to lighten the mood; at one point he had the genius idea to pose like a tourist photo of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, arms out in mock effort to push the Mayo tower over. "Is this lined up right?"

"Yeah, totally."

"Aw, please?"

"What can I say, I like making you look like a dumbass on the outside too." A smile! He'd cracked him.

Once they'd had enough of their little photoshoot, they decided to head for the Mayo Visitor Center to see if the folks inside would have any tips for their visit. It was refreshing to feel cool air conditioning again even after such a brief stint in the open Florida air - he thought he remembered a problem with Dream's AC, which was why they didn't have it turned on before, and which didn't bode well for hotter states ahead, but at least in here it was nice. He fluttered his t-shirt (plain black) appreciatively as Dream took the lead in approaching the receptive-looking blonde at the front desk.

"Hi! My friend and I are just here to visit for the afternoon - we wanted to know if there's anything cool we can check out while we're in the area? We're headed north if that helps."

"Alright, well, welcome to the only municipality in Lafayette County, Florida, boys! You can probably tell this place is a little small; we're mostly a political territory, but we are pretty close to some wonderful parks and woodlands. Most of our tourism comes from camping and hikers, so we have a couple of lovely little trails for pairs like you if you wanted to head down one of those for the afternoon!"

"That sounds awesome; do you have a map or something?"

"For sure," she smiled, pulling out a leaflet entitled 'Mayo Trails'. George almost choked trying not to laugh.

"Thank you so much!" Dream grinned as he unfolded the paper into a surprisingly massive map on their way out the door. "Okay, let's see - we are... here, and we need to go... that way," he pointed, "towards the river." The river apparently ran several metres below road level, as George could only really see the tops of trees in that direction. Still, they set off, walking steadily downhill on a pedestrian path that slowly degraded from tarmac, to concrete paving, to stone and gravel, until at last they were walking on dry, solid-packed dirt. This must have qualified as Being On A Hike, right? George wasn't sure - he had never been one to particularly appreciate nature. Really, he didn't think he'd go outside this much at all if it weren't for Dream and their car rides, and even those had dropped off sharply after Bad left. It used to be almost every weekend in senior year, but now he was lucky to get out with Dream every month. Mostly they just stayed in, got on Teamspeak, hit up some Skywars or occasionally their shared server with the four of them (Dream Team, obviously). It was weird, as much as he seemed the outdoorsy sportsman type, how much of a huge nerd Dream was. Still, George supposed he was lucky to have him, or after... all that yesterday, he wasn't sure when he would next have left the house. "Hey, check it out!"

"What?"

"You can already see the river from here!"

George squinted. Amid the dense leaf cover before them, he could in fact make out a sliver of something sparkling. "Cool."

Dream picked up his pace a little as the dirt slowly darkened and became a little softer under their shoes. They passed first one tree, then another, then a few more until they were thoroughly In The Woods. Did this count as the woods?

"Come on, I wanna see the water!" Dream, obviously impatient to lead him through the increasingly thickening cover of leaves and down towards the river, grabbed hold of George's hand.

George's thoughts froze.

Startled by the sudden skin on skin contact, he found his eyes drawn down to where Dream's fingers held his own, and distantly felt himself stumbling over a tree root as they went. Blood rushed to his face, for some reason. Dream seemed oblivious, not even turning back as he pushed onward to the riverside, a newly helpless George in tow.

Something pulsed down the centre of his chest like a drop of food colouring in a glass of water. Which was weird, because nothing much out of the ordinary had even happened - it wasn't like Dream had never held his hand before. Had he? He wasn't actually sure about that one. They'd known each other for a while, but he had no memory of anything like this.

He snapped out of his thoughts to adjust his footfalls as the ground steepened on its way to the water's edge; the last thing he needed right now was to fall face first into an unfamiliar river, and he liked this shirt too much to let it get muddy.

"Oh my god," Dream suddenly gasped as they finally drew to a stop at the bottom of the slope, "fishies!" He let go abruptly to crouch down before the stream, leaving George empty handed and a little mentally lost.

"There are fish?"

"Look! Little gray ones!" Without looking, Dream gestured for George to come and squat down beside him, then pointed out at the gently rippling water. George blinked to refocus his eyes below the sun's bright reflection on the surface, and suddenly he could make out dozens of tiny writhing bodies in the current, mingling and darting like he imagined an angry swarm of bees might. "There are so many of them!"

"I see it, I see it," he managed.

"Can we feed them anything? Do you think they like Doritos?"

"I, er, strongly doubt it -"

"I'm gonna throw them a Dorito," Dream decided, pulling the bag out of his front hoodie pocket and extracting a single tortilla chip. "Wait -" he clenched his fist, crushing the snack into smaller pieces and gently launching them into the crowd of fish, who went even crazier over the introduction of a new food source and sent a hundred tiny circles spiralling out across the otherwise undisturbed water's surface. He laughed - childishly, gleefully, beautifully - as he watched the little creatures wrestle and jump over each other to get at the crumbs he had bestowed upon them. George couldn't help but smile.

"Are you sure that's not gonna kill them?" he cautioned.

"No way, look at them, they love it!"

"I mean, humans love drugs..."

"Don't step on my fun, George!"

They watched the fish for a while longer. Dream had apparently been put off the notion of feeding them any more, which might well have saved the lives of several fish that day. Neither of them were even close to having a clue what kind of fish it was, but they nonetheless enjoyed watching the things play and swim as they sat amid the quiet atmosphere of a Floridian woodland.

Eventually, once George got bored, they decided to take the walk back in the direction they'd driven from, and hopefully pop back out as close as they could to where the car was. Of course, on the way, Dream couldn't help himself from pointing out all the cool fungi, neat leaves, and the occasional crop of flowers that they passed, and each comment was accompanied by him taking a picture.

"So you'll post a picture of a random mushroom, but not your face?"

"I'd post a picture of almost anything rather than post my face, George."

"Why? There's nothing wrong with your face."

"I already told you, I'm self-conscious."

George had never understood Dream's aversion to posting selfies and the like; it wasn't like anybody ever told him he looked bad. Quite the contrary, in fact - of the four friends over their four years at school together, Dream had had by far the most attention from potential suitors. It wasn't like the rest of them never heard rumours of crushes (despite equally hardy rumours that they were all fucking each other surviving their entire high school career), but Clay was the stand-out of the team on that front, and not for no reason. He was pretty much the total package, after all - smart, sporty, social, tall, and yes, hot too. Yet, somehow, he was still shy about pictures of himself.

"It's a good face. I bet you'd get like a million likes on it."

"I bet we're there," Dream both literally and figuratively swerved, pointing bluntly towards a gap in the leaf cover that led back uphill. George resigned himself to silently following his friend as they travelled back up the slope; it was clear he was hitting a nerve on the photo front. He wasn't even sure why he'd always been a little hung up on the concept. After all, what did it matter to him how much Dream showed his face? What did he need photos for, really?

Sure enough, with almost prophetic precision Dream had singled out the path that led pretty much exactly back to the car - they only needed a little leftward detour, as George discovered once his eyeline finally made it past "more hill" and into familiar building territory. There was the Mayo water tower on their right, its shadow having ticked over considerably while they'd been exploring so it now fell directly over the spot where they'd been standing earlier; there was the visitor centre way down the road to the left, hidden by a bunch of miscellaneous brown and grey buildings; and there was their car in the middle distance, which Dream had apparently already reached and was rooting around in the boot of the car for something. George picked up his pace to see what the fuss was about.

"It's gotta be here somewhere... Yes!" his friend exclaimed, brandishing something square that the harsh sunlight mostly obscured from George's vision. "I knew we still had this."

"What is it?"

"Well, you know this is my mom's old car, right?"

"Yep."

"We used to go to practice in this car, all of us kids, and when my sister was younger, she would get super bored on car rides (well, I mean, she still does, but now she has a phone), so we wanted to keep her busy on the way and that means that my mom bought -" he held it out again triumphantly, but this time George could only make out the further detail that it was a CD case "- this! It's perfect, George, you don't like the radio, I don't have downloads, but we're both gonna know this stuff already and it's gonna be super fun, don't you think?"

"I literally have no idea what that says." He took a few steps closer, squinting through the sun to make out the text. "Wait - oh my god, really?"

"You know it!"

_Disney Karaoke, Volume 1._

"That... is perfect, yeah."

He hated to admit it, but somehow Dream knew exactly how to lift the mood in all the right places. It seemed like things would all be uphill from here.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> see i told you itd get gayer!
> 
> (psst im on chapter 11 if you guys have ideas for what they can do between new orleans and houston pls suggest)


	4. Nothing If Not Totally Platonic

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Backing tracks, brushed fingers, and beaches.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hello it turns out the morning thing is a bad idea so we're gonna publish in the afternoon again welcome readers new and old
> 
> when we left off they had just been in mayo, and now day one continues!

"Under the sea, under the sea!" Dream half-shouted along with the bubbly calypso backing music. "Something a-something, I don't know the words, under the sea!"

They were well on their way to their next destination by now, as the world around them settled into the thick of the afternoon. George had noticed the traffic getting denser, but that didn't slow their pace on the highway - he wasn't sure if anything would. They'd decided to trade off every other stop on the journey, which meant that it was Dream's turn, and after a quick perusal of the map for himself he knew exactly where they were going: Pensacola Beach.

"Going to see Nick, we're on our way," he continued to sing, "something something we like to play! Ba bada bada, foot on a pedal, under the seaaa!"

"I thought you said you knew all these?"

"I do!"

"You have no idea what half of the words are," George chuckled.

"A little thing like having no clue what's going on has never stopped me before, George, why would it now?"

George just smiled and looked back out of the window as his best friend continued to jam along with the karaoke track. He didn't consider himself much of a singer these days, nor was he certain of most of the words either, so he was perfectly content to sit back and let Dream do the singing for the vast majority of the drive.

Except then Under the Sea faded out, and a familiar drumming started up -

"Let's get down to business!" he chimed in almost reflexively, straightening up in his seat. A steady grin widened across Dream's face in the seat beside him. "To defeat the Huns!"

"Did they send me daughters," they sang in unison, "when I asked for sons?"

Mulan might not have been George's favourite Disney movie of all time, but he was damned if he didn't know all the words to this classic. He remembered, as a child, watching his family's great conversion of every movie they had on VHS into a DVD of the same, and Mulan had been the last to be switched, meaning it was the last VHS George had actually ever watched. Of course everything was digital now, but the music still held a lot of memories of sitting down with his family during that time in which they said goodbye to an era, and nostalgia had kept every line stored somewhere in the back of his head, destined for this exact moment where he could dredge it all back up.

"You're the saddest bunch I've ever met -" he noticed Dream drop to a mumble on this line; of course he was just as under-aware and over-confident of this song as any of the others - "but you can bet before we're through, Mister I'll..."

Dream came back in full force. "Make a man... out of you!" He giggled as George continued to fill in the lyrics to the backing track.

"You're surprisingly good at hitting those high notes," Dream commented.

"Thanks," he replied between breaths. He had actually been in choir in, like, Year 7, but he'd quit once it became thoroughly established as a Girl Thing - he got enough shit for being nerdy, he certainly didn't need everyone calling him gay too.

It seemed simple enough to deduce that Dream only knew the chorus from this point on, as he let George do the majority of the heavy lifting when it came to lyrics. He felt like it sounded pretty good by the time he'd reached the bridge, even raising the volume a little beyond his usual comfort zone, and glanced over at Clay to gauge his reaction - but his friend had his eyes fixed firmly on the road, nothing to demonstrate he was listening other than the rhythmic tapping of his fingers as they drummed the steering wheel in time with the backing track. He wasn't sure why this was disappointing - he didn't exactly need approval from Dream, after all, did he?

"Be a man!" Dream finally, almost relievingly, came back in for the final chorus. George felt something loosen near his sternum, pressure he hadn't noticed building in his time spent performing solo.

"You must be swift as a coursing river," he supplied, and Dream kept up the call and response. This was somehow easier, and undoubtedly much nicer, with another voice beside him.

"Mysterious as the dark side of..." they finished together, George steadying himself for the final high note which was almost at the limit of his range.

"The moon!"

George's eyes widened as he heard Dream shoot valiantly for the correct pitch and find it wildly beyond his capabilities to hit at his goal volume. What came out instead, over George's fairly understated beginnings of a smooth vocal expression, was a mess of voice cracks that sent him stuttering above and below the target several times a second. George's singing rapidly dissolved into hysterical laughter, shortly followed by Dream's familiar teakettle wheezing at the indescribable sound he had just produced.

"Oh my god, no, I'm crying, I need to watch the road!"

"Are you okay?" George's voice came out impossibly high pitched and punctuated with laughter. He scanned for potential hazards, but the cars around them didn't show any signs of getting in their way, and they'd only just passed the previous exit.

"Ohhhhh my god," was all Dream could apparently reply. The noise died down as the next backing track began - something from Pocahontas, he thought; he'd never been big on that one, especially after learning the true story behind the names - but the giggling quickly bubbled back over on Dream's part and another round of wheezing spewed forth gracelessly. George couldn't help but smile as his friend desperately tried to maintain his driving composure while fighting off peals of laughter - he actually wiped a tear away at one point. "Oh my god, that was..."

"Horrifying?"

"Beautiful, I was gonna say," defended Dream. "Are you saying I can't sing?"

"Didn't _you_ say that, like, five minutes ago?"

"I said I didn't know the words, idiot, not that I couldn't sing them."

"You got lucky that I knew the song there, you know. I have no idea about this one."

"You don't know Colors Of The Wind?"

"Not really."

"You monster, George, I can't believe you."

"The real monster was what the soldiers did to the Natives, you know."

"I know, I know, your country is terrible."

"My country? Pocahontas happened in your country!"

"And where did all those colonizers come from?"

George opened his mouth to fire back, but wasn't quite sure what to say, so he leaned back in his chair instead. It was a pretty backing track, even if there was nothing to accompany it.

"You were-"  
"Don't you-"

They both spoke at once, paused, glanced at each other and inclined their heads to indicate letting the other speak in turn. This set George off chuckling again.

"No, no, shut up, you go."

"I was just gonna say, don't you know the chorus for this one?"

"I do! It's just, eh, a little out of my range, you know?"

They both laughed at that one.

The trip passed faster than he thought it could with performances of such an unpredictable skill level. One minute Dream would be masterfully improvising over Go The Distance, the next he would be incoherently stumbling his way through Friends On The Other Side, and every time it was truly a sound to behold. George joined back in a couple of times, but every time he started feeling like he was settling into it, he could feel Dream yielding to his voice, and he'd quieten back down in an effort not to overshadow his friend and the good time he was having in the driver's seat. His silence got a lot easier to excuse when they stopped off for late lunch at a combination gas station and Subway. (He used gas station rather than petrol station because there was just something so unmistakably American about pulling into the station and being greeted by both an off-brand convenience store and a semi-deserted sandwich shop.)

"You wanna sub?"

"No, I know what I want. Give me a minute."

"From the little store?"

He didn't reply - he was already on a mission by that point. When Clay finally reappeared from the depths of the Subway with a plastic bag in hand, George simply waved with one hand and held up his lunch in the other.

"Oh my god, not the popcorn!"

"I told you, this is my new diet."

"That does NOT count as lunch, you idiot."

"Reality can be whatever I want."

"You can take the sub if you want, but you're not gonna survive entirely off cheddar popcorn on my watch."

"Ew, no, I don't want your processed rubbish!"

"What-" he choked on a laugh "- as if that stuff is any better?"

The sandwich lay uneaten between them for a long time, as if Dream was seriously challenging George to take him up on the offer, but after another three songs and about halfway through the bag of popcorn, he seemed to finally acquiesce and claim the food he'd bought for himself. George smiled into his cheesy snacks - then smiled harder when a huge chunk of meat immediately squeezed itself out of the sub and landed directly on Dream's thigh.

"Noooo," he complained, "I can't get it, I have to steer!"

"That's so tragic," George snickered.

"Oh god, it's hot, I'm gonna get scalded. I only have two good pairs of pants for the whole trip, George!"

"That's on you for not realising you were gonna need more trousers if we're driving to Texas."

"It's gonna go cold and slimy," he practically whined.

"Shut up." George, now a little tired of the bit, reached over and grabbed the piece from his jeans to redirect it into Dream's mouth (which was still open mid-grievance). His fingers brushed the side of Dream's lips on the way out.

And it was... weird?

Like, he wouldn't go so far as to call it a shiver, or compare it to an electric shock, but something definitely shot up his spine at the contact. His hand fell back into place in his lap a little harder than he'd meant for it to as his arm muscles seemed to weaken from the sensation, and his head pulled itself aside, his eyes searching for anywhere else to look. He wasn't sure how Dream reacted, therefore, but his own nervous system was definitely going into overdrive. Which was, again, pretty weird, because nothing much had happened. He distracted himself by digging straight back into the popcorn (with his other hand, obviously) and reading every word on every sign with an intensity he hadn't used yet on the trip.

What song was playing? Something from the Rapunzel movie?

It surprised him when the car swerved sharply off the exit and downhill towards their destination, after a lot more songs had played through (he knew Disney had an impressive backlog, but this was ridiculous). He finally looked back over at Dream to see him having apparently long since finished the sub, but with his eyes still trained on the road as they so often seemed to be. He wasn't usually this careful of a driver on their old weekend trips, but then again, George supposed, this was a long one. It would do them absolutely no good to crash the car before they'd even left his home state.

The ocean gently flickered its way up the horizon, glittering under the angled sun with that hard-to-look-at intensity to which nothing truly compared. George wished he had his sunglasses, but they were in the back of the car about now - he'd grab them when they parked.

And then they did park, almost too close to the sand for George's comfort.

"Are we not going to get, like, swept away when the tide comes in?"

"Nah, this is too far back," he was reassured quickly, as he dug through his suitcase in the car boot for wherever he'd stuffed his -

"Aha!"

"You need sunglasses? George, it's like 5pm."

"The sun is literally right in our eyeline here."

"So? We can sit out, grab some boardwalk food, watch the sunset together."

"I don't know, sounds pretty sus to me," he joked.

"Nothing wrong with a couple of dudes having dinner in the light of the setting sun!"

"Oh yeah, totally. It'll be so hetero."

Dream exhaled sharply with a quickly forming smile. "Yeah, nothing if not totally platonic," he fired back.

And then they did head up to the boardwalk, remembering a little too late that they'd set out on a Sunday and that a lot of the smaller joints had closed probably minutes before they arrived. One of the only places left open, and definitely the safest bet they could choose, was a little takeout pizza truck, from which they each ordered a slice (George knew better than to question the efficacy of a single slice of American pizza as an entire meal - every place in the damn country was on Costco levels of massive slicery, like they only cut the pizzas into five or something).

And then they returned to the car just like they'd said they would, watching as tourists and locals alike filtered back up towards the more populated parking lot and the roads, leaving their little section of the spit almost pristine once the waves had rolled over it for a little while.

And then, sitting on the hood of the old Toyota Camry, George swinging his legs a little and pointing his toes to draw shallow lines in the sand, they quietly chewed on cheese and tomato and bread and watched as the sun painted the sky yellow from blue.

"I really wish you could see this properly," Dream murmured. "It's almost a rainbow."

"I mean, sunsets are always beautiful," he tried to reassure.

"Yeah, but you know it's not the same. Maybe I'll buy you some of those colorblind glasses."

"The Enchroma ones? Those are so expensive, though-"

"It can be for Christmas, then. Or your birthday."

It was George's turn for his voice to lower. "How many sunsets will I miss out on until then?"

A pause. "Too many."

"Tell me about it, then."

"God, I don't - I've always been a dialogue man, I don't know how to describe like that."

"What would you say, though?"

"I... I don't know. It's pink."

"I don't know what pink is, Dream."

"Like... the color of... flowers, I guess, a lot of flowers. Princesses, usually. Some people might call it the color of love, but, like, the sweet kind. Love like you love your first crush, or something. Gentle."

"I thought you said you were bad at describing!"

"What? That was so bad."

"It got the point across pretty well for me."

"It's kind of turned orange by now - orange is basically just yellow on steroids, everything goes orange for a while in fall, our physics workbooks were orange in high school... The friendship Care Bear was orange."

"The what?"

"You never saw Care Bears?"

"No. I actually have no idea what it is."

Dream actually let out a "pfft" at this, as if he couldn't believe the level of normie George was on. "The little bear guys who would teach you about being nice. They lived up in the clouds and shit."

"I never saw that."

"Never?"

"Never."

"Wow." They sat in silence for another moment. George balled up his napkin from the finished pizza and stowed it in his pocket for later. Dream, on the other hand, seemed half inclined to turn his into a paper crane or something, the way he kept folding it absent-mindedly in his lap.

"Is a sunset not red?"

"Not... not usually. Sometimes. I guess if the sun is feeling crazy that day. The whole sky turned red one time when I was little, I can't remember why."

"That did happen in London too, actually. Something about the Sahara winds blowing a bunch of sand north or something."

"There's no way that's what happened."

"It was before I met you, maybe my memory's gone fuzzy."

"Aww, you can't remember life without me?"

"I can remember back when life was peaceful, actually. Don't push it." But he was smiling, and he knew Dream was too.

And maybe, as the sun made tangent contact with the sea and the first few hints of stars began to twinkle overhead, he put his hand out, resting in the space between them, you know, just to keep himself propped up.

Maybe there was a quiet.

Maybe he felt gentle, sweet pressure envelop his hand as Dream's fingers entwined with his own. He wasn't looking.

And maybe a pit, dark and boundless and full of possibility and fear, started forming in his stomach.

Maybe now he'd figured out what was going on inside his head.

Because _oh._

And now things were certainly a lot more complicated.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> YEAH YOU LIKED THAT DIDN'T YOU SIMPS its ok i like it too thats why i wrote it
> 
> i am once again asking for ideas for the last few chapters, between new orleans and houston, you've got until i finish spiderinnit (coming soon) to inspire me
> 
> amazing art by [@inkedunder on instagram](https://instagram.com/inkedunder?igshid=1keroevvkkzxr) go follow them tf are you still doing here GO


	5. Biscuits And Gravy: A Debate

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Phone calls, friendship, and flyaway hairs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hello im back i know it didn't seem like anything was going on in my life bc ive been keeping schedule but Trust Me life is stressful and depressioninnit mother gothel dream arc wasn't helping but tommy character is ok now and i don't have to jump off the cadillac any more and i just finished writing a complete 33k word tommy centric fic coming out starting sunday (subscribe to my account to catch it!) and i can maybe focus on finishing this fic soon? which would be pog? anyway hands may be shaking but this was written in november so enjoy the phone call chapter :)

George stared into the minimum-brightness display of his phone, with a single Skype contact open, and pressed dial. He did promise himself that he was going to call Bad that morning, after all.

After the Moment of Realisation, as he'd now taken to referring to it (and he did refer to it, a lot, because it was practically the only thing left in his mind, taking up the lion's share of the space), they'd sat that way, not quite motionless but close, until the sun had long since dipped under the almost level line of the horizon and the timid constellations had lit up more boldly on a navy black sky. He'd been able to feel Dream's every breath; his own heartbeat pulsing in his fingers that were, on the outer side, firmly attached to the edge of the car; his mind whirring at a million miles an hour with thoughts he was apparently not allowed to access on a logical level. The seconds had dragged, palpable, and yet it had seemed an instant later that Dream had finally untangled his hand from George's and said quietly, lowly, "Let's go find a motel."

Which they had managed very rapidly, if George was any good of a judge for these sorts of things. The Grand Arch Motel had blinked its neon sign at them half-heartedly across the road before they'd even had a chance to turn the music back on, and they'd pulled in to a mostly empty car park without much hesitation. A tired receptionist had booked them a cheap room - twin beds, obviously - and they'd claimed a spot each pretty much at random. George had busied himself in his phone while Clay changed into his pyjamas, just a t-shirt and basketball shorts, then set to work in the tiny en-suite's sink scrubbing away at the Subway stain on his jeans.

"Oh, they have wifi!"

"Awesome," the distracted response came from the other room.

"So did you seriously only bring two pairs of trousers?"

"You already know I did. Do I look like the kind of guy who plans ahead? I don't even know what we're doing tomorrow."

"Aren't we driving through Alabama?"

"Yeah, but I have no idea what's even _in_ Alabama."

"Really? I thought you would, given it's kind of a sister state to Florida."

"Alabama is literally only connected to Florida in this one spot. Georgia's our actual sister state. Our way more religious but way less weird sister state."

"I mean, from what I know about sweet home Alabama, it could be a very different kind of sister state -"

"Shut up! Don't disrespect the place we're literally going to be in tomorrow, I'm sure it's lovely. Besides, there's no way we'll be there long enough to see any cousin marriages."

"I hope." He pulled up Maps again and zoomed out to view the portion of Alabama they'd be driving across. "It says there's a city called Mobile."

"Ah, I think that's pronounced mow-bull," Dream corrected.

"I thought you didn't know much about Alabama."

"What is it with you and calling me out? I don't, but I know how city names work, what's wrong with that?"

George didn't reply, zooming in on Mobile and tapping through to find out what Google had to offer him in the way of tourist destinations. "They've got a lot of Civil War memorabilia," he said instead. "There's a battleship."

"Cool."

"Good, we don't care about that, cross it off the list."

"Why do you think that's a no from me?"

"I don't know, just sounded like it. There's a cathedral... couple of museums... nothing fun, it looks like."

"Oh, come on, museums can be fun!"

"Can they?"

"Sure, what's wrong with them?"

"I don't know. Just boring. I guess I'm not the target audience," he explained, working it out more thoroughly with every sentence.

"If you don't see anything interesting, we can just stop to eat like we did this morning?"

"Sure. The all-American diner experience always appeals."

"You're weird."

"Are you taking a shower tonight?"

"Sure, if you want the morning."

"Cool. I just wanted to make a call."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. Just wanted to - check in with Bad, you know, because you know he'll call if we don't."

"That's true. Give him my love."

And that brought him to now, pressing the button to dial as the bathroom door shut and the gentle patter of a cheap, low-pressure shower started up like a white noise machine. Darryl picked up on the third ring.

"George!"

"Hey, Bad!"

"Are you guys on your way?"

"Yep, we're almost out of Florida." A smile spread across his face. He couldn't help it - Bad's joy had always been infectious.

"Woah, already? That's awesome. Did you do anything cool?"

"Well, we had pancakes first," he opened, Bad filling in each pause with a quiet 'mhm', "and then we stopped in Mayo and had a look at the river, and then we -"

"Hold on, Mayo?"

"Mayo, Florida," he explained simply.

"This is..."

"It's a town I found on Google Maps."

"OHHHH, a TOWN," he laughed. "What a stupid name for a town, right?"

"That's why we went! And we took a ton of photos with the Mayo tower, it was so ridiculous..."

"The Mayo tower being...?"

"It was a water-tower. It just said MAYO in big letters on the side. I want one for my back garden."

"You don't have a backyard, do you?"

"Well, no, but I can dream."

 _Dream_ \- he suddenly remembered the real reason he was on this call.

"He... Dream and I - well, I mean, we - we went to the beach. This evening."

"Right..."

"And we were sitting on the front of the car."

"Yes?"

"And I don't really know how to..." He swallowed. "Tell you."

"Okay, start small."

"We got pizza."

"Pizza is always nice."

"It _was_ nice. And we were sitting on the car and we ate the pizza."

"That all sounds good to me."

"And the sun was setting, and Dream was telling me about the colours."

"That's nice of him."

"It was nice. And... hands?" His voice dwindled to little more than a breath.

"What?"

He couldn't push the words out in the right order. He had to text it.

_georgy boy: he held my hand_

Bad was silent on the line for a few seconds after George heard the ding come through. Then he inhaled. Probably working out how to approach the issue.

"Well," he began cautiously, "did you like it?"

"What?" That came out way higher than he'd have liked.

"Was it an enjoyable experience, holding Clay's hand?"

"I..." _don't know_ , he didn't say. "It's still processing."

"Okay," Bad reassured, ever kind, ever patient, like he'd been over this a thousand times. "That's fine. You don't have to come to any conclusions if you don't want to."

"But I do want to," he said, and it came out a little louder than he'd intended it to. "I want to know how I feel," he tried again, quieter.

"Give it time then. See what happens tomorrow. What's your guys' plan?"

"Oh! We're gonna drive through Alabama," he put on the accent in what turned out to be a truly pitiful attempt but which made both of them giggle. "We're gonna... hit up a diner, and... eat some good ol' biscuits and gravy -" he dropped the voice "- have you ever actually eaten that?"

"I mean, yeah, it's not uncommon."

"It sounds so weird! Why would you want to put gravy on a scone?"

"Hey, scones are a totally different beast," Bad defended. "Biscuits don't have sugar in."

"That's what's weird about it! What was the need?"

"You're saying society has progressed past the need for biscuits?"

"I'm saying there never was one in the first place. The word biscuit should only refer to, like, custard creams."

"What?"

"You uncultured swines, America! I knew there was a hole in my heart from something."

The shower shut off behind him. "What are you guys talking about?"

"Biscuits." He put Bad on speaker.

"Your biscuits or our biscuits?"

"Yours. The and-gravy kind."

"Why?"

"Because of the diner tomorrow!"

"George, that's breakfast. You can't eat biscuits and gravy for breakfast."

"You can if you're not a coward!" Bad interrupted merrily.

"Oh, I am, though," George replied, putting as much joke in his tone as possible. "Very much a coward."

"See, Bad? We're gonna eat something normal."

"You could -" Bad stifled a laugh "- you could have muffins. You know, because you're such muffinheads."

"Hey, rude!"

"I gotta go, George, it was nice talking to you - and nice to hear from you too, Dream!"

"I love you! Did George tell you I love you?"

"No, he did not."

"I was gonna tell him at the end," George defended.

"I bet you wouldn't've. I don't know if I've ever even _heard_ you say you love someone."

"There's no way that's true," George protested, but the thought lingered for a while until they finished up saying their goodbyes to Bad and watched the Skype interface reconfigure itself post-call. Had he really never said it in front of Dream?

He supposed he'd never felt much need. The guys knew how he felt about all of them, they talked all the time, and they'd shared so many memories over the years that he just didn't really take the chance if it was offered. Dream was quite the opposite kind of person, though; he practically said it every day for all four years in school, and plenty of times after. They'd had a brief phase of Dream trying his absolute damnedest to make George "say it back" - from catching him off guard when he was focused on something else, to tricking him into reading it off paper or the Minecraft chat, to at one point threatening him with a plastic cafeteria fork. George never gave in, though, and eventually the trio accepted that this was just another one of George's quirks. He wasn't really sure why he'd stood his ground as the months went on - there was nothing wrong with saying what the other boys said to each other all the time, and it wasn't untrue - but something about it had always stuck in the back of his throat, and after a time it just seemed easier to stick to his guns on the issue. And, again, did he really need to?

He turned to keep talking to Dream, and was greeted with his best friend in nothing but a towel, torso very much on show. Which... NOT the time for this kind of display. He tried very hard to strike the right balance between looking and averting his gaze, but every time his eyes flicked up and back and away he felt more awkward and pervy, so he decided instead to make solid eye contact with the space between Dream's brows. The whole moment felt a lot longer than it probably was, because Dream didn't seem to have noticed the way whatever George was planning on saying before had nosedived straight out of the window at the sight of him.

"So do you wanna get in to brush your teeth and change?"

"Yes," he exhaled, grateful for the jumpstart back into being a normal person. He really had to get this under control.

When he came back out of the bathroom Dream was already settled into bed, the t-shirt (thankfully) having returned to cover what the sheets didn't. He lay facing away from George and with his phone propped up by the popsocket three inches from his face, the blue light highlighting his cheekbones and casting an ethereal sheen on his still-damp hair, every flyaway lit up like a faint halo in a room that was already otherwise dim. He was scrolling through Reddit with one hand and had weaved his arm under the pillow to support his head with the other. George had half a mind to call Bad back right that second, because wow.

The mattress was a bit too firm for his comfort, and the covers thinner than he generally liked, but with the Florida weather it usually ended up that he kicked most of it away in his sleep unless it was the dead of winter, so George supposed he could manage. After some thought, he turned himself to face out as well. The last thing he needed was to lose sleep over watching his stupid, beautiful friend breathe. In fact, really he needed to nip these emotions right in the bud, or they would probably cause some issues by the time they got to Austin - or before, and what then? What if, god forbid, Dream called the whole trip off and had George make his own way home?

No. That would never happen. Dream wasn't like that. Shut up.

Right?

"Goodnight, George," cut through the silence, warm and deep and a little bit slurred, as if Dream was half asleep already. He could practically feel his pupils dilating in the darkness.

"Night."

He had thought it would be impossible to rest at a time like this, and yet sleep came almost too easily. Perhaps it was the physical exertion of the day, all that walking up and down hills, or perhaps his brain had finally overpowered his heart and shut the whole thing down. Either way, the next thing he knew was darkness that felt like it needed cricket noises, that strange feeling of being too hot and too cold at once, and a murmuring voice.

"No, Sap... You don't get it..."

Dream. Nothing he needed to wake up for, then. He readjusted the bedsheets and snuggled into them, barely conscious. Sleep was so much better than thinking about anything.

"How am I gonna make it to you?..."

He didn't catch anything else, and in the morning the memory was gone with the rest of his fuzzy and irrelevant dreams.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> wow i wonder what dream was talking about shame george is never going to know because he wasn't enough of a nosy bitch to listen in
> 
> i love you guys last chance to submit ideas for the last four or five chapters of the fic like i said the last two times so get em down in da comments


	6. Coffee Creamer Tower Of Love

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sleeping in, shouting, and saying what you mean.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> if you're here from spiderinnit. hi welcome to the gay corner where i write gays because i am gay this is my main content

_Good morning, Day Two._

George scrubbed at his hair with the mediocre two-in-one the motel had offered them. Shampoo was just one of the slowly but surely growing list of items he'd forgotten to pack, even though if you'd asked him at the door he'd have sworn he brought everything he might need. A surprising amount of dirt had come out in the wash, actually colouring the water that pooled around his feet as he lathered the soap and ran his fingers through his hair - it must have been a mix of river dirt and beach sand. He would have felt bad for the state of his bed if this was still coming off him in the morning, but they'd paid for it already and they weren't exactly sticking around for the cleaners' reactions. They'd be in a different state in a matter of hours, after all.

He stepped out of the shower and, once he was clean and clothed (t-shirt and jeans, again - he knew he was basic), returned to the common room and propped himself up against the dresser on the far wall that both of them had foregone in favour of just living out of their suitcases for the night. They'd also ignored the TV living atop said dresser; it wasn't like they needed it when they had phones and YouTube, honestly. Dream was still in bed and had the covers pulled firmly over his head, clearly trying to block the generous flood of sunlight that the high window on the other side of the room provided. It was perfectly on course to shine directly into Dream's eyes, from George's calculations.

"Dream!"

"What?" came the sleepy reply. Dream had still been fast asleep when George got up - maybe he had trouble getting to sleep last night, for whatever reason.

"Are you getting up?"

"No," was Dream's muffled response. "Sapnap can wait another day for us to get there, bedtime can't."

"Dreeeaaam," he mock-chastised. "It'll be lunchtime before we get where we're going. I'm hungry."

A pause, as Dream weighed his options.

Then, "Fine."

He freed himself from the blanket prison of his own construction and sat up, shuffling back towards the headboard to keep his balance. The sheets fell down and folded like a dropped scroll, exposing Dream's entire upper body to the warm morning light. One of the sleeves of his shirt had ridden down to expose a shoulder and half a collarbone, the remnants of fading acne scars texturing and forming constellations on skin that otherwise glowed almost ghostly pale in the sun. Now that his hair had dried out on the pillow, that halo of flyaways George had seen last night was even more pronounced, and though Dream squinted past the sun so George could hardly see his eyes behind his glinting eyelashes, his golden hair lit up white in a ring of fire around the edges and illuminated his whole face. His mouth hung slightly open, the skin sticking at the edges of his lips which looked desperately in need of hydration, something Dream had also apparently noticed as his tongue darted out to wet them for a split second before they pulled closed.

"Good morning," he grumbled, and even that was breathtaking.

What had George told himself last night about control?

"Hi."

"Alabama," Dream said, after a pause and with the distinct impression that it had taken all his mental effort to turn the right cogs in his brain and reach the proper conclusion. His eyes were already closed again, but that might have just been because of the sun.

"Yep."

"Pleeease can I have another ten minutes?"

"You're going to fall asleep again if you don't get up now." Many a time in the past Dream had arrived to school late with the same story of having woken up on time, he swore, but giving in to the temptation of ten more minutes' rest and ending up parked three streets down because every space was full onsite.

"You're such a meanie."

"I want to eat. You will too by the time we get going."

Eventually he coaxed Dream up and out of bed, the latter complaining all the time about pretty much everything there was to be complained about. Still, within about fifteen minutes of George scrolling through his explore page, Dream had changed into his second pair of jeans (a darker blue) and the hoodie, brushed his teeth, and smoothed his hair down to a more presentable level. They zipped up suitcases and George waved to the front desk employee on the way out, Dream trailing behind him like the kid of the family in the airport at 5am who didn't realise he had to go to bed early to wake up early. Except, you know, it was now well past 9am.

"Do I have to drive?"

"I don't have a license, Dream."

"You could pretend."

"I'm not gonna do that."

"Oh come on, it's the middle of nowhere."

"Dream! We're not breaking the law just so you can go to bed! Splash yourself with water if you have to."

"I don't have any water," he pouted. What an adorable bastard.

"Drive."

And he did, reluctantly. It looked like most of the tiredness had worn off once he was forced to really focus on not getting the both of them killed, which was definitely a good sign. George watched the location marker blink over from Florida to Alabama across the state line about twenty-five minutes later and let out a little cheer. Another twenty-five minutes and the signs that pointed to Mobile had stopped gradually increasing in number and had fallen off altogether, suggesting they were there. Parking was pretty easy for such a big city, and cheap too, which was nice. He didn't like feeling like Dream was paying for too much, after all.

It turned out that downtown Mobile was really lovely, and they spent a little longer than George's stomach might have liked just sightseeing the pretty buildings and the statues of Civil War figures. Finally they spotted a cute-looking establishment on the corner of a street, all red and white and cliché, and were able to settle into a booth without much trouble. After they ordered coffees Dream leaned over to let George know that he'd been needing the restroom for a while, and disappeared into the back of the building, leaving George with nothing but his phone.

Oh, right - it was still on aeroplane mode from the first few minutes after Lauren left, when he'd needed to shut her out, and in the heat of the moment had been unable to work out how to block a number. She was the type to triple text at the best of times, always insistent that he needed to get back to her the moment he got her message (he'd thought so that she knew he wasn't cheating, but he supposed not), so it was no small wonder that when he flipped the switch to turn his signal back on, no less than _twenty-eight_ messages trickled in with buzz after buzz turning his hand to lead. Finally, after the flow seemed to dry up, he clicked into the thread and began reading through Lauren's emotional rollercoaster of the last 48 hours. She seemed to go from tearfully apologetic at first, to annoyed at his lack of response, until finally she was screaming at him in all caps, calling him many a bad name, most frequently a bitch-ass two-faced whore.

Bullet very much dodged, in hindsight.

Here was the coffee - he nodded silently at the waitress, who seemed to be about to launch into a little bit of friendly chat, but whose smile faltered when she met his eyes and who backed away with a look that might have been concern. That was fine with George, though; Southern hospitality never failed to exhaust him, coming from a background of entirely ignoring strangers unless necessary back in the home where he'd grown up. He took a quiet sip of his drink and cringed at the scalding bitterness. This was why he usually went to Starbucks or somewhere where the coffee was half sugar no matter what you ordered. It wasn't until he set the cup back down that he noticed the tear that had gathered in his eye - he laughed internally. How weak was that? One sip of coffee broke his resolve. 

"Did you miss me?"

Dream. He blinked away the signs of vulnerability. It wasn't like he needed to burden Dream with any of what he'd just been reading. "Obviously."

"Aww, I thought you were gonna say no and I'd have to bribe you with creamer and sugar, but you do love me!"

"Actually shut up," he found himself smiling, slipping into the same old easy banter. Dream sat down across from him and opened his arms, almost a dozen little pots of dairy clattering out of his cradle hold and onto the table along with some equally ridiculous number of sugar packets. It was heartwarming - he bit back whatever embarrassing noise he was going to make at the sight, his eyes welling up with thin layers of tears again, and simply allowed his smile to widen.

"You're a little piss baby, right, I know this, so I got you a bunch of materials you can use to turn your coffee into not coffee," he said almost proudly about the offering.

"Dream..." The tone was exasperated, but his heart swelled despite the namecalling. "Says the guy in the piss hoodie." He knew it was green, but they looked the same, and when Dream had first arrived at school in what would soon become his new favourite article of clothing, George had been quick to point out the similarity to Sap and Bad's collective delight. All three of them had pulled out the devastating last-resort "piss hoodie" takedown at some point in their high school careers, although Bad had called it the "pee hoodie", to George's great irritation.

"Really?" Dream's mouth opeed in a shocked grin, and then he _bit his lip_ as he looked aside and George was forced to bury his face in both hands to save him from the sight.

He heard the phone buzz again. Text number 29 had apparently entered the playing field. He didn't even bother picking his face back up.

"What's up?"

"Don't worry about it."

"I told you, George, that is literally the only thing I do. What happened?"

"It's nothing, I swear."

But he heard something scratching around on the table, and when Dream spoke again his voice was cold. "This your ex?"

"Lauren. Yeah."

"She sounds like a real bitch."

"You had to know her," he defended weakly, because for some reason he still felt bound to uphold her honour.

"I am..." he scoffed, "REALLY glad I didn't."

And then he heard shuffling, which meant that he did look up from hiding in his palms, only to see Dream having stood up with George's phone in hand and striding towards the front doors. George fought the urge to follow him and find out what the fuck he was doing because if they both went outside they'd probably get in trouble for not having paid yet. However, it quickly turned out he wouldn't need to get any closer, because Dream was loud enough that pretty much the whole restaurant could hear.

"Hey, stop texting this number, alright? No, of course this isn't fucking George, do I sound like - what does it matter? I'm his friend. I don't care. I don't care. I don't fucking care. I heard what you fucking did to him, you're lucky he only ghosted you, because I know for a fact if I was there I - I literally do not care. Stop texting this fucking number. Leave George alone, you've done enough damage, you dick. You are not the victim here. Stop te - just fucking never contact this number again, jesus, he doesn't need any more bullshit from you. I don't care. Never contact him again, asshole! Fuck off!"

George tried not to stare as Dream returned to the table, gripping the phone like he'd wanted nothing more than to smash it into the ground outside. He could almost see the storm brewing behind his best friend's eyes as he slid the phone back across the table. "So... who'd you call?"

"Oh come on, George."

"I... what did she say, then?"

"She tried yelling at me, I don't care. I just wanted her to get out of your life."

And this was so sweet that the tears came back at full strength, and George didn't try to stop them this time. Clay's steely frown immediately softened to worry and surprise, and he leaned forward to fill up George's rapidly blurring vision.

"Hey - it's okay, Gee, you can talk to me." But the lump in his throat wouldn't dissolve; he could only try to blink the tears away, eyes flickering over every inch of Dream's face. "Is something wrong? Were you scared?"

"It's-" his voice cracked roughly "- it's not you." That was the most important thing; that was the one thing he had to force out. He swallowed and took a deep breath, then tried again. "She's just - left this huge, smoking crater in my life. And I know you're trying to help me build it back, with all of this, but I have no idea what fits where. It all feels so big."

"Oh, Georgie, that's alright. She fucked you up badly, I know that. That's why we're here. But if you don't want anything big, then we can start small, okay? We can start with coffee. Yeah?"

"Yeah." He cleared his throat and tried to wipe his face clean. "It's probably going cold by now."

"I don't care about _that,"_ Dream reassured, moving back in his seat again.

"At least I didn't get any mess on your hoodie this time."

"What part of 'I don't care' are you not catching, stupid?"

"And -"

"Literally shut up and drink your coffee, George."

So he grabbed a pot of coffee creamer and a few packets of sugar to mix into the now-tepid drink. The sugar would pool at the bottom of the cup, no doubt, but everything else stirred together quite nicely (it had been a while since he'd mixed a coffee with a real metal teaspoon). He gave it another experimental sip. Much better.

And he looked up, and Dream was building a little tower of creamer pots at the inner side of the booth, practically sticking out his tongue in focus. When he'd managed to tower up nine of them, he poked it in at the middle and laughed as the plastic structure tumbled back down into another mess.

And George thought, _I love you._

Dream looked up, catching him staring, and for a moment George thought he might be brave enough to say it, but the familiar sticking feeling won out in the way it always did and the moment passed. He scrunched up the empty sugar packets he'd collected and flicked the resulting ball at Dream instead - maybe that could have been his plan all along. It seemed to work, because Dream laughed again, a quiet and gentle wheeze. God, George never wanted to go another day without hearing that laugh.

But Dream wasn't going anywhere. He had all the time in the world to say it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey i stole that whole ending from a tumblr post so this chapter is dedicated to that post i cannot find it
> 
> sorry this came out kinda late, but u kno, it's christmas
> 
> also merry christmas/happy holidays to u all


	7. The Middle Of Nowhere, Mississippi

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Or, Rascal Flatts teaches us the meaning of life.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i can't think of another triplet summary for this one so that's all you're getting

The rest of their time at the diner was an overall great success. The food was clearly cooked with love, and all thoughts of Lauren were banished from George's mind, even if only for a few minutes, as he and Dream moved from small thing to small thing. Dream was clearly just spitting out whatever popped into his head, but George didn't mind that. It gave him extra time to appreciate a few small things of his own: the crinkles at the edges of Dream's eyes whenever George said something a bit stupid, the way he fiddled with his hoodie strings while they waited for the bill, the freckles that dotted his cheeks now that they'd spent more than a few hours out in the sunlight and wandering the town... Something about putting a name to the feeling had seemed to make George a couple of pounds lighter, and the soft smile on his face refused to let up its occupation of his expression no matter the topic of conversation. It seemed like every few minutes a new detail would reveal itself to George's previously oblivious eyes, or something he'd already been aware of would entirely flip in how he perceived it, turning every inch of his best friend, inside and out, into something to be praised. It was wonderful.

Dream was wonderful.

Once the sun had reached its peak above the city, they realised that maybe leaving the car parked outside in the heat over lunch would not be the best idea, and blindly found their way back to the car park in as much of a hurry as they could manage without quite knowing what Maps was trying to tell them. Unfortunately the air inside the car had already warmed up to some degree, and the black upholstery of the seats definitely didn't help to create a cool environment. George felt that sheen of sweat that only collected in humid, enclosed environments like these forming on his forehead and uncomfortably permeating his hairline; he wished he had a long sleeve to wipe it off with instead of his woefully under-qualified hands. Dream seemed to be feeling it too, because at the first petrol station he saw they pulled off the road and escaped the developing sauna almost simultaneously.

"I'm gonna need some comfort food after that," George sighed, quite relieved to be in the open air again. A breeze was blowing and if he tilted his head in just the right way it dried up his skin and very effectively cooled his face down.

"Not another bag of popcorn - what's that gonna be, three in two days?"

"No."

"... No?"

"Four!"

True to his word he doubled up on the snack purchase as Dream, exasperated, grabbed himself some real food from the shitty little to-go display and a bottle of water for each of them. He sent George yet another scathing look at the till - but hey, he was an adult, it was delicious, and he could use his money how he wanted to. What was left of it, anyway.

No. Think small.

"You know you're encouraging my hedonism, right Dream?"

"I don't even know what that means."

Then it was back into the frying pan for the pair as they tacitly agreed to try and speedrun the rest of their Alabama detour, and possibly all of Mississippi. As Dream accelerated George once again reclaimed his phone and its bountiful source of 4G, asking Maps to calculate the time to his roughly placed marker on the border of Louisiana. Two hours. They could withstand it for that long, surely.

As if in response to George's growing doubt and discomfort, Dream cracked the window open first on George's side and then his own. "I really wish I took my hoodie off before I put my hands on the wheel."

"Don't you have an AC unit?"

"Yeah, but my sister stuck a chicken nugget in the vent when she was little and it permanently fucked up the flow. She literally never got to ride shotgun with food again, it used to piss her off so bad having to wait for fries on the way home."

The memory was clearly precious to him - it seemed like this car was full of family memories for Dream, from all the stories he'd told over the years. George knew how that felt; he had actually cried as a fourteen year old listening to his dad sell off their old car in advance of their emigration from England. The new one had smelled too different and the seats had been too stiff from lack of wear and the whole thing felt too clean and new to afford him any comfort for the first year or so he had gone anywhere in it. Dream's story had a totally different vibe, though, one where the car was an extension of home.

George certainly felt at home in this car, he decided. It wasn't weird or uncanny to be here by Dream's side as their surroundings de-urbanised and buildings turned to fields around them. Of course he'd spent a few years getting to know the vehicle when they went places in the past, but even if it had been his first time he almost knew he'd feel the same, like this was a place where he could belong. He clicked his own window button to bring it down another centimetre or so and the white noise of rushing wind increased, the refreshing cool air just brushing across the top of his head in that infuriating way that reminded him at every moment how if he were taller this would be hitting him perfectly in the face. He looked over at Dream and scraped his lip with his teeth in frustration when he saw his best friend's hair fluttering halfway down his face from the current. Stupid genetics.

"What, are you thinking about fries now?"

"No. I like hearing about your family stuff, is all."

"What was with the lip bite then?"

"I didn't bite my lip, I just went -" he mimicked himself from seconds before. "Your window is better than mine."

"Why?"

"The wind comes straight on your face, it goes right over mine."

Dream paused. "... That's what she said?"

Idiot. "I'll allow it."

"My face might be alright, but my whole upper body is pretty much overheating," he lamented, taking a hand off the wheel to rapidly oscillate the fabric of his jumper back and forth by the neck. "Can you take the wheel for, like, five seconds so I can get this?"

"What? Really?"

"Sure. As long as there's no cops in sight we should be fine, and there aren't any, because we're literally in the middle of nowhere on the interstate and we're gonna be here for the next few hours. All you have to do is hold it steady while I escape fabric hell."

That was how George found himself leaning directly into Dream's personal bubble for what felt like a very long time as his friend removed his hoodie. He could hear Dream struggling with the sleeves, felt the cloth hit him in the back of the head more than several times, and experienced a number of interesting noises coming from a muffled Dream that he couldn't help but put a face to for every one. The most disorienting thing was the strength at which he could smell Dream, obviously stained by sweat and diluted by days on the road and in foreign beds, but that hoodie had been collecting the scent of his detergent and his house and his soul for Dream's entire adult life and a couple of years besides. Obviously he had been this close before - what was that thing on Saturday if not a great deal of getting up close and personal? - but never in his current state of mind, and never with this level of interest in savouring every second. He took Dream for granted too often.

"I'm free!" he finally heard, above the gentle thump of the hoodie hitting the back seat. Dream's breath landed squarely in his hair and even that was cooler than the air around him at this level.

"Great, take this back."

"I'm taking it!" Their hands touched in the swap. Not that that was much to write home about.

"Jesus christ, I don't even want to know how illegal that was. Or how many people saw."

"Why, do you not want people to judge you?"

"Does anyone?"

"I love being judged. It means I get more attention."

"Well you'll certainly get attention for taking your top off on the road while your poor helpless best friend tries to stop you from crashing into something."

"I didn't take my top off, do I look shirtless to you?"

"You know what I meant!" It was the sun that was turning him red.

Not long after that they crossed over into the next state again. This time George alerted Dream a bit before, and they had a simultaneous moment of celebration. Another state closer to Sapnap - closer to the end of the trip.

The joy of the celebration dimmed a little bit for George at that. He cracked the window a little further down.

They'd played out the whole Disney CD the previous day, and he could have gone for another go around that, but something about it seemed to dissuade Dream from singing at the same time as him, so he considered giving the radio another shot. This time he fiddled with the dial until he'd left the pop stations far behind and arrived at a little bit more of a classic.

_Life's like a road that you travel on / When there's one day here and the next day gone / Sometimes you bend, sometimes you stand / Sometimes you turn your back to the wind_

"Oh my god, I have not heard this song in _years,"_ Dream grinned. "This is middle-of-nowhere interstate music if nothing else is."

"Not that I would know," George replied with a solidifying smile of his own.

"Come on -" and he rolled down both their windows at once with the buttons on the driver's side "- find out!"

The wind started to roar past them where before it had only been able to fit a hiss through the gap, so George turned the music up accordingly. They flew past the rest of the cars around them and into an emptier niche of the road flow. It felt like they had their own personal bubble of world to hover in, a bubble that no one else on the highway dared interrupt. Nobody else could have what they had. Nobody else really even needed to exist but him and Dream, eyes watering from the strength of the rushing air, faces lit up, hearts beating in sync (he imagined).

_Life is a highway / And I wanna ride it all night long_

Dream scatted along with the melody of the guitar riff. Road signs flew overhead. George couldn't help but nod his head to the rhythm.

_If you're going my way / I wanna drive it all night long_

And if it was only mid-afternoon, and they had the whole night, it was going to be an awesome ride. He stuck his head out of the window impulsively; he could already feel his lips cracking from the hot atmosphere's pressurized drying power, but something about it was really nice. Cathartic, probably.

"What are you doing?"

"Finding out how it feels to be a dog." And, true to form, he stuck his tongue out in the wind, just to test that too. This was peak freedom and shamelessness.

"You're an idiot," Dream declared over the song, but George could hear he was still smiling.

"Try it, come on!"

"Then we really would crash."

"And whose fault would that be?"

"Definitely yours, dumbass!"

They turned the radio back down and the windows back up after Rascal Flatts had finished informing them about the meaning of life, and George decided this radio station was worth their time at least until they cleared Mississippi. He was only familiar with some of the tracks they played, because it wasn't like this was the music his parents had raised him on, but everything felt appropriate to their drive and kept the mood going smoothly. For about an hour they drove past small towns and lakes and rest stops, talking about nothing again.

"So what's your favourite season?"

"Hmm," mused George. "Probably winter, honestly."

"Really?"

"In America, at least. It's pretty shit in London because you never get proper snow, just slush, but here it's just quite cool out all the time and you still get a nice Christmas and everything. Plus everything getting dark early means you get to spend more time in bed."

"I guess that's fair enough," Dream conceded. "I'm definitely a summer guy, I think."

"You would be, Florida Man."

"Oh come on, don't bully _me,_ Oliver Twist."

"What's so great about summer, then? Isn't that just all the time here?"

"I only mean the first half of summer. You know, like, school just let out, beach days, ice cream, sunblock, there's a lot of good memories in it."

"Alright." He studied the road they were driving down. It was pretty much entirely empty, rough and starting to get mottled with pale dust the further west they travelled. Fields of some green plant that wasn't corn dominated the landscape.

"Winter's nice too, it's not like I hate any other season, but I just feel nicer in the sun."

"Well, I do hate summer here. It's way too hot, and the storms are scary. You just don't care because you were born into it."

"I said first half of summer, remember? When the heat waves hit, it's a whole different story."

"Fine, if we're allowed to split the seasons in half, I'm taking the first half of winter. Nothing even happens in February."

"There's Valentine's Day?"

"Oh, true. I've never actually been in a relationship over Valentine's, you know. One girl broke up with me literally five days before."

"I remember that! We watched _Love, Actually_ that time, and we both hated it."

"Something to do, though. How does it feel to be the closest thing I have to a real Valentine's experience?"

"Oh, I am honoured, Georgie," Dream laughed. "I don't get how you only started getting girlfriends out of school, given how crazy pretty much half the girls in high school were about you."

"What?"

"Oh come on! You never heard them talking about you? It was all about the accent, from what I heard. They totally fought over you."

"Why would I -" _want that_ , he didn't finish. He tried for something less personal. "Coming from you."

Dream made an inexplicable noise. "Huh?"

"Like you weren't clearly the Chad of the friend group basically the whole time, Dream!" he semi-laughed, a little bewildered by the idea that Dream had never noticed the female attention he received, a little compelled to defend his perception of the way high school had played out with Dream very much the main character and not George in a love interest role.

"You've gotta be j..." He trailed off just as quickly as he'd sprung to quip back at George a second earlier.

"What is it?"

"The fucking - we never bought _gas_ , George." The car made a disconcerting noise behind them.

"Gasoline?"

"Look!" Dream almost shouted, splaying a hand on the wheel so his fingers pointed to the dashboard. He leaned over to parse it. Fuel tank empty.

Seconds later the car rolled to a stop.

They were alone in the middle of nowhere, Mississippi, with no way out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> welp, if you've read fasten your seatbelts you know what's coming next


	8. Remember When I Told You Fuel Was Important In Chapter Two?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Adventures on a hot dirt road.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ok im getting DANGEROUSLY close to running out of prewritten chapters lol ive just been brainrotting literally everything else... this fic will be finished, this i swear by the stars, my small audience who are actually here for dnf and not smp content

_Shit._

"I'm so fucking stupid," muttered Dream with his face in the steering wheel, "how many fucking gas stations have we been to so far, three?"

"It's not all on you, Dream, I could have reminded you if I thought about it."

"You didn't have to think about it, it's not your fucking car."

"Whatever - look, it was stupid, but you haven't done anything bad. Let's just move past it and think about what happens next, is that okay?"

Dream replied only by groaning in frustration into the vinyl of the wheel. He heard the noise of a trainer-clad foot slamming into the front wall of the car once, then again a moment later.

"Are you okay?"

"Fine. I'm past it. Let's get out of the car, I don't wanna get cooked."

They stepped out on to the dirt road, which almost burned to the touch even through George's shoe soles. The air was dry and flecks of dust were picked up in the current on the ground. George surveyed their surroundings. Pretty much nothing but fields. Why had they been driving down such a remote stretch of road, no phone lines in sight for miles across the flat landscape, at the exact moment they ran out of petrol? It was almost cruel.

"Do you think we can... push it?"

"I'm not that strong, George."

"What if I helped?"

"You'd snap like a twig."

"So we just have to... what, wait for someone else to come by and hope they can help?"

"I guess."

Dream propped himself up with folded arms on the top of the car. The short sleeves of his shirt exposed freckled arms that George had never appreciated before, and which he rarely saw due to his best friend's over-reliance on his hoodie. His face portrayed quite plainly that he was still pissed at himself for the whole petrol thing, but that he was putting on a brave face. Probably for George's sake. Not that George needed him to. Dream's dark grey t-shirt was patched darker with sweat - definitely a good idea to take the hoodie off, then.

"I mean, it's not like nobody else in the country wants to get to Texas," he said hopefully.

"They would be driving down a way different road," Dream explained with as much patience as he could muster, "I wanted us to be alone on the road so I went south on purpose."

"You did? How much time does that add on our journey?"

"How am I supposed to know?" he almost snapped. They weren't meeting eyes.

"Okay, fine, let's just... We'll wait, and if anybody comes by we can ask for help, and if nobody comes by we'll start walking."

"I -" suddenly Dream pulled his arms off the car roof again (maybe it had started to sear) and paced around to the front. "Sure."

"Please don't beat yourself up over it."

"I'm not."

"Okay," he acquiesced, still not entirely convinced.

Silence.

"Which way is the wind coming from?" asked Dream.

"Er..." He licked a finger and held it up - that was how you were supposed to check, right? "It's going that way, I think, side on."

"Okay. Shift over." And Dream rounded the car to George's side, leaning on and sliding down the car into a sitting position. George stepped back to let him get comfortable, then followed suit, leaving a reasonable amount of space between them. He didn't want to make anything weird, after all.

He stared out into the expanse of fields before them. Nothing seemed to move but for the gentle sway of the crops before them. He wondered what plant it was - wheat and corn were easily recognisable enough, and he knew what saffron looked like from enough times his parents had gushed about how pretty and yellow it was passing by on the train as a kid, but these plants were leafy and split into neat rows with shallow valleys, as if someone had taken a giant rake to the soil and marked it all off with one pull of the teeth. The sky above them was close to cloudless and its brightness made it hard to look at - but something about the emotions that George could practically feel simmering under the surface of Dream's skin made him even harder to face, so he settled for a little stinging behind the eyes.

"I'm so-"  
"What do -"

They paused again, Dream holding the silence for long enough that George could only assume he'd given up on what he had to say.

"What do you want to, um, talk about?"

"Something unimportant." He was quieter than George would have liked.

"Okay, how about... What if we played two truths and a lie?"

"I - I guess that works?"

"Good." George scanned his mind for facts Dream might not already know, but drew a pretty big blank. They'd known each other long enough to have most of these conversations - and the one thing that Dream didn't know was one that he couldn't. "Um, I used to have a cat, I made a YouTube channel once, and I don't like noodles."

"Easy. The cat."

"Actually, I did have one when I was a baby. It's the YouTube channel."

"Really? You never tried?"

"Never. I always wanted to, but I didn't think I was funny enough."

"Oh come on, I bet you could have been the next Pewdiepie."

"Not gaming! You think Minecraft is coming back any time soon? I would have been a vlogger."

"Okay, so you could have been the next Dan and Phil."

"Both of them?" he smiled.

"Sure."

"If we were older, though, can you imagine us being Minecraft youtubers?"

"I actually tried, when I was a kid. I got like twenty subscribers and half of them were Sap and Bad on alt accounts." The thought was clearly cheering Dream up, which was nice. It did bring with it just a touch of that same old third wheel feeling, though. Fourth wheeling? But four wheels makes two pairs, unless you're on a tricycle, in which case...

"Okay, I'll go." George was brought violently back out of his mental tangent, which was probably a good thing. "Uh... I hate rollercoasters, if I went to college I would have majored in computer science, and my sister ate her twin in the womb."

"You've told me that!" George responded easily. "You were gonna be an English major."

"What? When?"

"I don't know, on Discord."

How do you remember that?"

_Because I remember everything about you. Because you're my best friend. Because I -_ "It just stuck to mind, I guess."

"That's bullshit, best of three."

"No! You can't lose and demand a best of three!"

"Well what did I just do then?"

And before George knew it Dream's frustration had evaporated like a puddle in the mid-afternoon air. They bickered over who knew the other best, each taking it as a joking point of pride. They circled back on the 'sister eating her twin' point once George clocked it a few minutes later, which evoked a blessed teakettle laugh from Dream as he watched George's facial expression cycle through a myriad of possible reactions before settling on resigned acceptance of the bizarre fact. They watched the wind roll over the fields in rippling waves of leaves as the sun moved ever westward and cast an ever longer shadow over where they sat, dampening the glow of Dream's golden hair to a softer yellow. Everything was nice again.

_No, you can't kiss him right here and now._

"I guess nobody's gonna pass us," George finally concluded after a lot of sitting and talking. Dream's face fell again. He wished he hadn't said anything - he really hated that look on Dream, especially when he was the cause.

"Yeah, I guess."

"We should walk."

"Back or forward?"

"Definitely forward, we didn't pass a sign of life for a long time on the way here."

"Sure."

Dream stood and extended a hand to pull George to his feet as well. His hand was warm and strong, and George's own hand felt awkwardly sweaty and small in the grip. He should have wiped it first like Dream did.

"What's the bet another car comes, like, RIGHT when we leave?" Dream muttered, amused at the thought, as he pulled his belongings out of the car and tied his hoodie around his waist. George, who only had his suitcase to bring, gave him a nod and a nose exhale to acknowledge the irony of the proposition, but with how long they'd been hanging around next to the car it didn't really feel like a possibility any more. He had the sneaking suspicion that they were driving down a private road, which was why nobody else was here. It definitely didn't feel like the kind of place Google Maps would route a driver.

"I might cry if we get far enough down the road to miss it."

"Again?" George didn't have time to reply. "Actually, no, sorry, that was rude. If you cry I'll dry your tears again, just like any other time."

"Yeah, I know." Dream had been there almost every time he cried since they knew each other - from a few weeks in when adapting to a new school system had really got the best of him as a teen ahead of their first scheduled test, to deaths in the family, to every breakup he'd been through since they left school and George started really meeting girls in a way he never used to in education. Dream was always a text away; the only times he didn't come to comfort George had been when George's fear of bothering his best friend had overcome the need for comfort and a familiar face. On the other hand, Dream never seemed to cry - he was only ever smiling or angry, honestly. Maybe his tolerance was just higher, or maybe...

"You know? Okay, Han Solo."

George just laughed and started pulling his suitcase down the road. He heard a beep as the car locked behind him, and Dream was swiftly at his side.

"If you get tired, let me know, okay?" asked Dream suddenly.

"Why?"

"It's a surprise."

"Okayyyy," he elongated, to demonstrate his lack of understanding and hopefully give an undercurrent of suspicion. Dream just smiled wider.

"I bet you wish you'd been eating more than cheesy popcorn and breakfast food these past few days now, don't you?"

"Excuse you, that popcorn is actually the perfect food to keep me going. Carbohydrates give you slow burning energy."

"Sure, sure. Meanwhile, me and my protein will be heading down this road at twice the strength."

"You don't need to prove your manliness to me, Dream."

"Oh yeah? Well, you totally do."

George stuttered in disbelief. "You don't think I'm manly?"

"I mean, it's not like you're a girl," Dream teased, "but I think we can both see who's superior."

"I can't believe you sometimes."

"So you're not disputing me?"

"I mean, obviously I am!"

"Prove it."

"How?"

"I don't know, can your zero IQ brain not think of a way?"

"You're impossible." _And I love you._

_What if I did it, right now? Stopped you by the arm, turned you to look at me, pulled you in. What would that prove?_

"I'll just take the dub, then," Dream grinned.

"Actually shut up."

They kept walking for a long time, passing field after field that George couldn't keep count of, nothing on the horizon changing. This really was the flat side of America. The repetition wore into his shoes until the soles of his feet ached and he was pretty sure he could feel a few blisters forming, which was just wonderful considering he didn't own any plasters. The ache seeped up his legs and into the rest of his body like water on chromatography paper, weighing him down a little more with every passing minute of monotony. Eventually, he cracked,

"Okay, I'll bite, I'm getting exhausted."

"Yeah? You sure you can't walk any more?"

"This is starting to sound threatening."

"It's not dangerous, I promise! You might just find it, I don't know, weird or whatever."

He didn't care at this point. "Hit me."

"Okay, stand still." He did. "Legs further apart."

"What?!"

"Do it, you bitch boy."

"I literally hate you so much." He did it, though.

"Okay, here goes -" and Dream crouched in front of him, wrapped George's arms around his neck, and in one smooth movement hoisted him off the ground in a piggyback. "There!"

"Are you kidding?" His voice pitched up a full octave as his feet suddenly left solid ground and he found his body settling into Dream's.

"Don't clench your legs so tight!" was Dream's only reply. "That hurts!"

"Oh, don't touch me there!" he mocked without thinking. Dream choked on his retort, which turned into laughter.

"What are you doing, step-Dream?" he finally got out, and then George was laughing too.

They walked like this for a little while and George thanked Dream silently with every throb of his ankles that he wasn't still walking on them. He got used to the bobbing in the air and the new perspective on the road from higher up.

"Hey, I just noticed that I'm taller than you now."

"You so aren't!"

"I am," he insisted, "the weather up here is wonderful."

"I can put you down any time, you know," Dream threatened.

"You won't."

"Why not?"

"Because you love me." Like so many other comebacks it came without him really thinking, and he blushed as soon as his brain processed what he'd just said. He could have sworn he felt Dream's neck heat up as well, but it might have just been his arms.

"You know I do," Dream replied after a breath or two.

"Exactly, so you'd never drop me."

"Just because that's true doesn't make it right."

"That literally means the same thing!"

"Shut up, I'll probably drop you anyway, this is really tiring. For such a short guy I really thought you'd be lighter."

"I don't exercise, all the weight hides in my thighs."

"I don't need to hear about your fat ass, George!"

"What? Nobody said anything about my arse!"

"Same thing as your thighs."

"Weren't you a footballer? Surely you should know those are different muscles."

"You don't take a class on what muscles there are to do football. Most of those guys barely knew how to count."

"As if you do," he mocked.

"George, I LITERALLY professionally write code for a living."

"So you know how to work a calculator, that's not counting!"

"Hey, I - I hate to ruin the moment, but my arms are actually getting tired."

"Oh. No, it's okay, if you need to let go you can."

And so he did, and George landed painfully flat on his feet. "Oof."

"Do you wanna sit again for a little while?"

"No, we need to get somewhere. We've walked far enough already."

"If you say so."

And that was how they ended up walking down the dirt road as it got thinner and rougher, the sun still beating down, until George realised he hadn't had anything to drink since that coffee and who knew what he'd had before that, and the reason he realised this came in the form of him very suddenly and unexpectedly falling on his face.

"George!" He heard the suitcase clatter to the ground behind him. Then there was a hand on his shoulder, turning him to the side a little roughly.

"Ow."

"Are you alright?"

"Dehydrated is my best guess."

"God damn it. Idiot."

"I just forgot, okay?"

"No, not you," Dream huffed.

"Oh my god," he let out as another flash of pain hit from the legs up. "This is it. It's the end of the line for me."

"Really? You're just gonna die and leave me here?"

"I hope not," came an unfamiliar voice. Not American, George clocked, even as his brain spun, lightheaded. "I'm not really sure how I'd explain a dead body to the authorities."

Dream's hand left his arm in a rush, the spot on George's arm feeling almost lonely. "Wha- what the-"

"Sorry, I didn't mean to scare you, it's just that we don't usually get random travellers on my property."

"Your property?"

"Well, technically it's a public road, but these fields are ours."

"And - sorry - who's that?"

"Oh, no, I should be sorry for not introducing myself! The name's Phil."

"Clay," Dream responded, sounding a little breathless. "This is George, he's... dying, probably."

"Well, I guess we'd better take him back to the farm!"

"The -" Dream paused "- oh. Oh my god, I didn't even see it." George craned his neck to look for a second, catching a glimpse of something dark in the near distance, but then his head flashed with static again and he had to lie back down, eyes closed.

"Why are you walking this way, anyway?"

"Our car ran out of gas a while back that way. We were walking to find a gas station or something."

"Oh, you boys are lucky. There's nothing to see for miles but this farm around here, but we do actually have a few gallons of petrol spare in the shed."

"Thank you so much! George, can you..." He opened his eyes again to find Dream's face inches from his own. "Yeah, no, no way you can walk."

And then he was being picked up again, but this time strong warm hands supported his back and his knees. Bridal carry.

"I'm so sorry for getting in your way, Sir."

"Phil, please, Clay. And it's no problem at all - you can stay the night if you want to, in fact."

"Really?"

"Sure! It's no trouble at all, we have a bed spare anyway. And besides, the boys will be thrilled to meet you."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> wooo sleepy bois time! this is what i meant by additional character tags to be added but i might wait till the fics done to do that


	9. Potato Field Interrogations

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Good cop, bad cop, and an awkward cell to spend the night in.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> very very rapidly running out of chapters so will probably fall off after next week or week after but idk *shrug emoji*
> 
> and now, sleepy bois!

George was pretty sure he fell asleep a couple of times on the way to the farm. Or passed out, rather, assuming there was a difference. Either way, every so often the light of the sun surprised him and he had to blink his fleeting thoughts into order. His hands weakly gripped the fabric of Dream's t-shirt, against which he was practically being cradled, and his legs hung heavy and pained in the air beyond him, trainers hot and constricting around his feet which were probably swollen. However, sooner than he'd expected, he was being put down again, feeling cloth beneath him. A sofa, probably.

Dream explained how they ended up out here as he heard Phil ambling around the room, briefly running a tap. Water sounded great right about now.

"Here - George, was it?" Phil asked, and George opened his eyes to a kind smile and a glass of water with a straw. He put in the effort to lift his arms and take the glass - plastic - and take a sip, which quickly turned into impassioned gulping as the coolness of the water finally registered to his senses. He swallowed a little too much air on the way down and a painful bubble forced its way down his throat. "Wait, take it slowly, it'll come right back up again if you're not careful."

"Th-" George paused for a coughing fit. "Thank you." He was unexpectedly hoarse.

"Oh, you're British?" Phil sounded incredulous. "Never thought I'd be surrounded by yet another bloody Southerner."

"Huh?"

"My middle child comes from your way," he explained, "we like to get on at him for the way he says grass." He affected the last word with a mocking open vowel.

"Right." George didn't really follow, but he let himself blame that on the state he was in.

"Clay told me you haven't been keeping hydrated, so I reckon start with that and we'll get you more water in five or ten minutes, alright mate?"

"Yes," was all he could think to say.

And then the blonde stranger was gone again, leaving George to try and maintain his self-control in regards to the water. He took another sip and leaned over to watch his hand as he placed it on the floor lest he drop and spill it all over the nice carpet (red, he thought).

"Do you feel better?" Dream's worried, familiar voice cut through the building silence.

"Yeah," he decided. "Water's good. I think most of it is being inside and air conditioned."

"And your feet?"

He wiggled his toes experimentally. His shoes were off, he realised. "Fine."

"That's good," Dream replied quietly. They sat like that for a little while. "I should have made you stop."

"No, you're not my keeper, it's not your fault if I push myself too hard."

"Was it all that talk about manliness?"

"What? No, I'd forgotten about that."

"Okay, that's... good. I'm sorry."

"I hate it when you do that."

"What, apologise?"

"Apologise when you did nothing wrong."

"Oh." He blinked. "...Sorry."

This was so ridiculous and so very Dream that they both laughed.

"Phil?" came yet another foreign voice from across the room. George looked up - a boy in a yellow jumper who looked about sixteen was standing on the stairs. "Who are these people?"

"Introduce yourself," was all Phil yelled from somewhere ambiguously upstairs.

The boy smiled sheepishly and cleared his throat. "My name's Wilbur."

"Hi, Wilbur!" Dream smiled, adopting an almost teacherly, gentle tone. "I'm Clay, this is my friend George. We were walking through and he stopped feeling too good, so your, uh, your dad said we could stay the night."

"Hmm," Wilbur frowned. He looked the two of them up and down. "I suppose that's alright."

George, feeling his strength return, pushed himself into a sitting position on the sofa. "And your authority's a factor in this, then?"

"George, don't antagonise the kid you literally just met and whose house you're about to stay in overnight."

"Yes, as a matter of fact," Wilbur insisted proudly, "I'm the second in command. Phil runs everything by me first."

"Alright," George relented.

"Where are you from?" asked Wilbur abruptly.

"Oh, er, I was born in London -"

"Me too!" His face lit up in an excited smile, and the authority he'd been putting on melted away in an instant. "I haven't met another Londoner literally since I got adopted, this is... really cool, actually."

"So why are you here in the middle of nowhere, Mississippi?"

"Oh - Phil said it was time for a change about two years ago so we just picked up sticks and got on the plane to our new home. We farm potatoes now. Well, it's mainly Techno who farms potatoes. It was his farm first."

"Right."

"What about you? Why are you British in America?"

"I... My dad's job, originally. I've lived here for five or six years."

"Interesting." Wilbur sat on the bottom step where he'd been standing, elbow propped on one knee, stretching the limits of his skinny jeans. "And how do you know your... friend here?"

"We went to school together."

"Well, that's nice. Why are you here now?"

"We're taking a trip," Dream interrupted, "to visit another friend in Texas. We came from Orlando."

"Right," Wilbur mused, "just the two of you on this trip, then?"

"I mean, yeah."

"Very interesting," he said again. Something about it was just ever so slightly irritating to George.

Wilbur stood up again, looked them over again, and finally continued on what George assumed had been his intended path towards the kitchen. A minute or so later, as George was taking another few sips of water, Wilbur emerged again munching on an Oreo and with a handful piled up in the crook of his other elbow.

"Does your dad know you have those?" Dream asked, again entering that teacherly tone of voice, but on a sterner level. George noticed that he'd put the hoodie back on at some point since they'd arrived.

"Phil doesn't need to know anything about my snacking habits," Wilbur replied, aloof, mouth full of cookie.

"Wilbur," called Phil, as if by telepathy, "Please don't snack before dinner."

"Why not? These two are going to split the food in two more portions, I need all the support I can get. I'm a growing boy, Phil."

"I'll cook more. Keep it to a minimum, please."

"Why so polite? You'd normally have sworn at me by now."

"Wilbur! I'm trying to make our guests feel like this is a normal household."

"There's nothing normal about this place," Wilbur muttered, rounding the corner of the stairs and disappearing up them. Dream and George turned to each other, but they barely had time to breathe a reaction in each other's direction before a new voice entered their field of experience. They would never forget this moment - the moment they first met Tommy.

"IF WILBUR GETS SWEETS I WANT SOME TOO!" a high voice complained loudly from somewhere above them, and a blur of a boy shot down the stairs and straight for the kitchen. Then the blur stopped in its tracks and wheeled around to face them from the kitchen doorway.

"Hello," George began.

"Who are you people?"

"Jesus, is every child in this house so rude?" he wondered, half smile and half confused frown.

"I'm not a child, I am a very big man," the boy immediately groused, like he'd been told this a dozen times today and each had been more offensive than the last.

"Sure. I'm George. This is - this is Clay." It always felt a little weird to say 'Clay', after years of Dream coming as naturally to his lips as his own name.

"Why are you British?"

"Wh- I was... born there?"

"That's alright, I suppose. I'm British because I was too powerful to be born anywhere else. I was also too powerful to stay there, though, which is why I live here now. And because Phil brought me."

"O...kay."

"Anyway, why are you here?"

Dream tried the teacher voice tactic. "Your dad took us in for the night because George had a little bit of a fall on the road outside -"

"Did he get hit by a car?"

"... No, he just fell over."

"Well it sounds like he's a bit of a pussy."

"Excuse me?" George was incredulous.

"I wouldn't need to stay at someone else's house just because I fell over. I'm just so very strong and massive that I can walk it off."

"I'm sure," Dream agreed with the same kind of smile-frown George had worn earlier. They exchanged glances. "What's your name?"

"Tommy," he grinned, showing off his braces. "And I'm twelve, if you were wondering."

"I wasn't," murmured Dream. "Weren't you in the middle of something, Tommy?"

"What? OH! Yes, I was protesting the injustice of Wilbur getting to eat sweets before dinner and not me." He wheeled back around, still never losing his energy, and George watched through the doorway as he ferreted through the cupboards. "So are you two boyfriends?"

No denying it this time - Dream definitely blushed at that one. However, it was just as well, because George felt his cheeks heat up exactly the same. "No," said one or maybe both of them.

"Really? Are you married, then?"

"No! We're - we're just friends." Dream explained quickly.

"What are you doing in the middle of nowhere like a couple, then?"

"We're going to meet our other friend," said George, reaching for his water again. He felt almost better, but a headache was starting to form as the leg pain ebbed.

"Where's your other friend?"

"Why do you have to know?" Dream was clearly close to breaking point with the kid.

"I'm just interested. You're the ones in my house."

"He's from Texas," George supplied more gently, "why don't you go show your brother all the sweets you've found?" Tommy had amassed a respectable pile of packages on the corner of the dining table and George could see it through the door.

"Not so fast, I need to check them all first. Techno always leaves literally one in the packet and puts it back." The boy busied himself opening every package and tossing them either out of eyeshot or into the bin behind him.

"Techno? Wilbur mentioned him too."

"He's our big brother, he came with the farm. He really likes potatoes - that's probably what he's out doing right now."

"Oh, so you farm potatoes here?"

"Yeah. Techno's probably the best potato farmer in the entire world," Tommy beamed. "And I help sometimes."

"Lovely."

Not long after that the child completed his thorough sorting operation and blurred back up the stairs with an armful of packets to show his brother. Again, Dream and George hardly had time to process their interaction before Phil was before them again, this time having clearly gotten comfy in a green-and-white-striped dressing gown of sorts. A kimono, maybe?

"Hi, you two! The spare bedroom is ready for you when you want it."

They shared another look. "Bedroom?" As in, only one?

"Well, sure. That's okay, right, you don't mind sharing?"

"I..." George really wasn't sure. But he didn't want to turn down a free night's sleep, Dream was going to pay for any motel they might choose instead, and he felt guilty enough as it was. "I'm fine with it if you are."

"Yeah," Dream replied, sounding a little choked, "no problem on my end."

"Cracking! Right, if you want to unpack anything, dinner will be ready in about forty minutes." And then he, too, was gone, closing the kitchen door behind him. They heard a muffled fan starting up from within the other room.

One bed, huh?

George tried to stand and, although the dull ache in his feet remained, it was considerably easier to make his way across the room to the stairs. Not quite sure what to do with the water glass, he drained it and held it to his chest. The pressure brought some strange comfort - not that he needed comfort, because it was just going to be sharing a bed with Dream, and he'd slept in the room with Dream all those times before, and he'd made it through last night, and... Well, he'd had Bad to help him make it through last night. It was unclear how well he'd deal with things solo.

The room they were to share sat patiently at the end of the corridor once they had ascended the spiraling staircase. On their way, they passed a couple of doors - one unmarked, one with "TB" scratched into the white paint, and one that seemed at war with itself, half stickered with pictures of instruments and doodled on with flowers, half very largely labelled TOMMY in a dark colour and surrounded by lines and stars and squiggles. No prizes for guessing who slept where.

Their own door, while also pristine, was held open by an unassuming doorstop which set it apart from all the others. Inside, George could see their suitcases pushed against the wall, which had a very pretty blue and yellow vine pattern climbing it on all sides. The matching bed (one bed) was huge and had plenty of pillows, although he wasn't sure they would need them all. On each side stood a white end table with a few trinkets on it, and thankfully he spotted sockets in the wall on either side as well - without Dream's phone they would probably die before they made it to Austin. The wide window above the bed overlooked yet another field of potatoes, where a figure could be seen combing through the crops from a distance. (George had the suspicion that this was the fabled Techno.)

Dream walked in further, admiring the decorations, as George grabbed his suitcase and settled on one side of the bed, the one with a little ceramic hedgehog sitting on its side table.

"This is such a pretty purple," he commented. Purple, not blue, then.

"I wouldn't know."

"Oh, sorry-" Dream seemed to remember what George had lamented earlier and cut his apology short "- it's nice, is all I meant."

"Are the vines yellow or green?"

"Green," he inclined his head towards the pattern as if looking a little harder would make it any clearer for George.

"I thought it was all blue and yellow."

"Oh. That would look good too, actually."

"It does."

Silence, again. Dream joined him on the other side of the bed, facing the other wall, in rifling through his suitcase and unpacking anything necessary. Pyjamas (they'd sweat enough into what they were wearing), toothbrush, towel, tomorrow's outfit, because he had nothing else to do. Tension thickened.

"Are you sure you're okay with sharing?" he asked, cutting it about as effectively as a butter knife.

"Yeah. Are you?"

"Of course."

"Good."

They had a long night ahead.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> not pictured: blood for the blood cop


	10. Oh My God, They Were Bedmates

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> George is caught alone with his least favourite kind of company - the kind that tries to make him talk about his feelings.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> yeahhhhhhhhh kinda run out of chapters now, prepare for impending hiatus if i don't finish chapter 11 by next friday, which i may well not because school's back
> 
> this chapter was finished on november 26th last year (thanksgiving), funnily enough, the day i started writing spiderinnit, and since then i've managed about a third more of a chapter for this story to this day
> 
> anyway i hope to see you next week, and either way, enjoy this week's installment!

George had decided that he really hated this weird state of up-and-down he was constantly in with Dream since everything with Lauren had happened. One minute they were having a wonderful time, best friends the same as they always had been, all jokes and knowing looks and smiles. Then something little would happen and everything just felt different and awkward. It worried him that he might unknowingly be doing something to drive Dream away - he couldn't afford to lose Dream, because he was Dream, and Dream was pretty much all George had. He didn't know what he'd do if Dream didn't want to hang out with him any more.

It was possible that his love was coming on too strong, though; maybe he needed to take it back a step to avoid ruining things.

"BOYS," Phil called from downstairs, "DINNER."

George stood and was about to head through the doorway when Wilbur and Tommy beat him to the corridor, clambering past each other like starving wolves, fighting over what sounded like absolutely nothing whatsoever. He smiled - now that was a sibling relationship. They raced each other downstairs without even a glance up in George's direction.

"Is that what you and your sister were like at his age?"

"Hmm? Oh, yeah, I guess."

The kitchen was warmer than the rest of the house, heat from the oven likely overpowering the air conditioner in this corner of the house. Tommy and Wilbur had already staked claim on the seats at the head of the table which seemed hurriedly adjusted to seat six; from all the sounds of kicking he could safely assume they were engaged in a serious and all important foot war underneath the table.

"Are you two just... like this, then?"

"Like what?" they replied simultaneously, engrossed in the fight. George decided to take his chances sitting next to Wilbur, and he felt Dream filing in on the other side.

"Yes," Phil replied absently from the oven on the other side of the room, "they are literally always vying for the role of second in command."

"Which is _mine_ , Tommy," Wilbur growled with a particularly vicious swing of the leg.

"Fuck you!"

"Tommy!" Phil frowned, whipping around to tap the child with the culinary instrument he was holding and turning back so quickly that George didn't have time to make out exactly what it was.

"Sorry, Phil."

"No, you know what you have to say," Phil chastised.

"Sorry, Wilbur."

A beat.

"Sorry, Tommy," Wilbur said, dejected.

"Good. Now shut your mouths and stop hitting each other while we have guests."

"Yes, Phil," they both complied. In the newfound silence George could hear Dream very quietly snickering.

"We're just about ready to serve up then, right?" Phil asked the table.

George looked at the kids, who were nodding enthusiastically. "They seem to agree."

"Perfect, then I'll just get -"

The side door swung open across the room. A third kid stood in the doorway, face on the less cheerful side of blank, assessing the tableau he'd just walked in on.

"Phil, who are these people?"

"TECHNO!" Wilbur and Tommy lit up to see the stranger - their other brother, he deduced - entering the room. Phil, who had been pulling something out of the oven, turned and beamed as well as he set the tray down.

"Techno, you are just in time. I'd like you to meet Clay and his friend George, they're staying in the spare bedroom overnight," Phil explained again.

"Um. Hi," said Techno, surprisingly monotone.

"Nice to meet you," George tried.

"Yeah."

"Talking's not his strong suit," Wilbur leaned over to George and whispered.

"Sit down and I'll get serving, alright, mate?"

Techno silently pulled out the chair across from Dream and stared towards his brothers' end of the table. George heard a brief uprising of the kick war start again but it was quelled by Phil approaching the group with plates of food. It looked like a very promising roast dinner, and of course potatoes lined one side of every dish.

"A roast on a Monday?" asked Wilbur.

"Guests," repeated Phil, as if he was tired of explaining.

He set George and Dream's plates down, to which they chorused, "thank you."

The meal turned out really nice, and George could hear that everyone else at the table was in agreement, as conversation died entirely for the time it took them all to power through it. The only interruption to their tranquility was that he noticed halfway through the meal that Dream was tensed up beside him - he looked over to see his best friend's hands down, eyes flicking between the plate and the teenager that sat across from him. Techno was staring Dream down, eyebrows furrowed, chewing slowly on a piece of meat, and as George watched Techno turned his eyes on him for a couple of seconds before returning to looking at Dream. Then he spoke. 

"So are they..."

Tommy and Wilbur immediately and frantically shook their heads. Techno nodded solemnly and returned to his food, leaving George just a little too bemused to question the exchange.

Once everyone's plates were emptied Phil cleared his throat and pulled out his chair, standing. "Clay, did you want to lead me back to your car so we can fill it up? I'm not sure you want to have to get all the way back up the road tomorrow morning."

"Uh, yeah, sounds great," Dream nodded and followed suit. Before George knew it, he heard the front door swinging shut, and he was alone with the children.

As Tommy and Techno started dutifully clearing plates away and washing up empty glasses, Wilbur remained in his seat next to George and took his turn to stare, smirking as if he knew something George didn't.

"What."

"Seems like a great friend, doesn't he, your Clay?"

"Um... yes?"

"He does, he really does, it's heartwarming. How long have you known each other?"

"Oh, um, the whole time I've lived here. Six years in a few months."

"And you've been best friends the whole time?"

"Yeah."

Wilbur leaned in slightly. "...Nothing more?"

George scoffed, leaning back as far in response. "No, what are you on about?"

"Oh, nothing, I just couldn't help but notice that he seemed awfully... protective of you."

"Well, I've been out of it today, of course he'd be looking after me. I'd do the same."

"That's what I'm saying, you see, George. It just feels like you have a very... strong bond."

"I mean, yes?"

"Right, right, you get me, we're on the same page here, good."

"Um," George fidgeted under Wilbur's scrutiny (how could a sixteen year old make him feel so intimidated?), "I'm really not sure what you're aiming at here."

"Don't play dumb, we've all picked up on it."

"Yeah," Tommy piped up as he shoved a stack of clattering plates into a cupboard on his tiptoes, "I noticed because I'm so smart and good at noticing things like that."

"Shut up, Tommy," Wilbur said without turning around. "We're trying to hold an interrogation, remember?"

"Yeah, I'm the bad cop!"

"Which _means_ that it's not your _turn_."

George couldn't quite believe what he was hearing. "Excuse me?"

"Fine, since Tommy ruined it, I'll just lay it out for you. You're both obviously in love with each other."

Words failed George for a long moment.

Then he mustered the brainpower to rebut, "Dream's not in love with me."

"AHA!" Tommy shouted in celebration, almost dropping the tower of glasses he'd just collected from the drying rack, "who's Dream?"

"It's obviously a nickname, Tommy," Techno explained, monotone and without looking up from his washing.

"Yeah," Wilbur steered back off-tangent, "but the main point is that I was right and I'm a genius. Well, I guess that's not the MAIN point, but it is worth noting."

"Are you serious?" George tried to drag the boys back to what seemed like the obvious point of contention here. "What's... what's your end goal here?"

"Well, Tommy and I had a little chat earlier while you two were fraternising in the spare room, and we both agreed that you two seemed like a very good match, so we wanted to find out if there was anything behind it, and clearly there is."

"Like what?"

"Like everything!" Tommy, finally unable to resist, slammed his hands down flat on the table across from George. "Sorry, Wilbur, I'm taking over, Big Police has entered the interrogation room."

"Ugh, have you been talking to Tubbo again-?"

"Tubbo's not important right now! I am, because I'm going to be asking the questions."

"Shut up, it's not even your turn yet -"

"Right, anyway, George, the fact remains you just told us you're totally in love with your best mate out there, Clay, Dream, whatever his name is -"

"I never said that!"

"You said that he didn't love you," corrected Wilbur smugly, "ergo you do love him, or you'd have said that instead."

"This is unbelievable."

"Look, George -" Tommy seemed to have a hard time fitting his mouth around the name "- we aren't going to spoil it for you, we just want to know before you two start sharing a bed next door to me and Wilbur tonight if we're going to... you know... hear anything -"

"You're kidding me," he rushed out before his mind had a chance to fill up and spill over with all the things they might be heard doing in another life. "There's seriously nothing going on with me and Clay."

"Let's rewind," Wilbur cut in, "I just wanted to clarify what happened to you two this morning."

"Hey, I barely got to have my turn!"

"Tommy," he warned, adopting the stern tone his father had used earlier.

"Fine, bitch."

"So, George, walk me through how you ended up here, if you would?"

George sighed. All three brothers looked on expectantly - even Techno, who was supposed to be minding his business, as far as he could glean from the setup of this 'interrogation'. Resolving to leave as many of his emotions as he possibly could out of the recount, he cast his mind back about eight hours.

"Well, nothing much happened when we got up -" except that he'd taken one look at Dream shining gold under the light of the morning sun and nearly left his principles behind right then and there "- or when we went for lunch -" except that he'd broken down over a string of stupid texts and Dream had gone to bat for his honour and peace of mind with unparalleled intensity "- it honestly wasn't very interesting until we ran out of petrol."

Except for the way that one little thought had twisted every part of Dream into something wonderful ever since that moment in the diner, no matter what he did or how they were feeling, lifting the unknown weight of something big from his mind and replacing it with basically the equivalent of the balloons on the house in Up.

"And then we sat around the car for a bit -" and made it feel like it always used to feel again, made him feel like the hopeless romantic teenager he'd never dared to be in his actual younger years "- but nobody passed us so we decided to walk until we found civilisation -" until his feet had shown their first signs of defeat and Dream had literally lifted him out of discomfort for as long as it took him to feel better, for as long as his arms could stand to keep him out of pain "- and then eventually my body pretty much gave up on the whole walking idea, and that's when Phil found us -" bickering as they always did in the dirt, and yet the compassion and concern in Dream's tone had been unmissable in that quiet moment before they were interrupted by the friendly stranger "- and I will admit it does get a bit fuzzy here, but basically he picked me up and took me here with Phil -" it was a white lie, he didn't remember most of anything before the glass of water (except he was pretty sure he could still feel Clay's hold on his back and legs if he thought hard enough about the way all his muscles had set off imperceptible explosions in sync from the exertion and the heat), but he didn't need to worry these children like that "- and that's when you showed up."

The council of interrogators took a moment to process. He hadn't actually said that much out loud, had he?

"He carried you?" Wilbur checked, oddly quietly.

"Yeah."

"Sounds pretty much like love to me."

"That's what I was thinking," Tommy shattered the atmosphere, as he seemed such an expert at doing. "If I was walking with you and you fell over and died I would have just kept going until I got home, and maybe I would come back for you later but only if I felt like it."

"Tommy," Techno half-smiled from behind both his brothers, "how many times do we have to tell you to shut up? You're failing the vibe check pretty thoroughly here."

"Failing the-? I'll have you know that my alpha male vibes are immaculate!"

"They're cringe, is what your 'alpha male vibes' are."

"Shut up, not in front of our guest!" It was Tommy's turn to channel Phil.

"Ah, alright," he conceded, and returned to quietly finishing up the washing and drying and wiping of counters.

"Either way," Wilbur gently steered them back to the topic at hand, "I'm pretty sure you didn't tell us everything - which is alright! - but from what I did hear, I'd be pretty confident to say that you're on track for love even if you think it's not there now."

"I..." George shook his head free of the memories and unwarranted fantasies that had crept in as he narrated. "Are you three always completely mad like this?"

"Pretty much," deadpanned Techno.

"Phil must go insane on a daily basis, out here with no form of human interaction other than you."

"Probably!" Wilbur beamed. "We do have great fun here, though, you'd never guess it but we do. Phil's probably the best dad ever."

"Hold on," insisted Tommy, "we need to get back to the love issue. Can I have my go again?"

"You already had a go, mine's still going," Wilbur deflected smoothly. "I have more to say."

"So would I if you let me -! Fine, good cop, see how far you get without a straightman behind you to make everything actually work."

"You - you think _you're_ the straightman, Tommy?" Wilbur actually turned and laughed at this, leaving George unregarded for enough of a brief moment to collect his thoughts on the matter. Some of them, anyway. They thought _Dream_ was in love with _him?_

"Why wouldn't I? I love women."

"You don't have to be a straight man to be a straightman, Tommy, it's a totally different thing."

"I knew that!"

And then what might as well have been a winged saviour from the beyond came to rescue him, because the front door clattered open behind him again, and Phil and Dream were home.

"Everything alright in here, boys? You haven't been intimidating our guest, I hope?"

"Never."  
"No way!"  
"Not me..."

"They've certainly been... an enlightening crowd, I'll say that, Phil," George couldn't help but smile as he stood to escape the company of the Brothers Invasive and get back to Dream's familiar territory.

"Oh, God, what did they do?"

"Nothing!" protested Wilbur, hands up. Ironic, considering he'd been the one who was a 'cop' moments before.

"All I'll say is I'm really sorry if you have to live with that every single day, Phil."

"Oh - well then that tells me nothing, they're always three little bundles of chaos like that."

He was happy to let Dream explain the simple tale of venturing back down the dirt road, gallons of fuel strapped to each of their backs, finding the car and bringing it back to life with surprisingly uncomplicated success, and then running it down to the little driveway area outside the farmhouse just minutes ago. It was, he insisted, a far better story than the one the three boys had given him this evening.

Before he knew it, they were both all done with their evening routines and ready for bed. In this bed that they were about to share.

"Dream?" he asked, sat back on his side again as his friend made getting-changed noises out of eyeshot.

"Yeah?"

"You're definitely fine with this, right?"

"I don't know how many times I need to tell you it's totally cool before you believe me."

"Okay, whatever, I guess."

A pause. A soft noise. Dream sat down behind him.

"George?"

"Yes?"

"I... I'm sorry for getting us stuck out here tonight."

"It's really not your fault, Dream, it's nobody's fault that we both managed to visit three petrol stations in two days and never remember that cars need petrol."

The absurdity of it, probably, made Dream laugh. "God, we really are zero IQ out here, aren't we?"

"I suppose."

Something in it dissolved the tension like candyfloss in water, and nothing weighed on George's mind for a moment as he pivoted his feet off the floor and tucked himself into bed beside the still-sitting Dream. Damn, it really was comfortable. He could sleep through anything under these covers.

"You getting in?" he checked.

"Yeah, sure, fuck it, why not," was Dream's borderline overkill response - and then he was there with George, head sinking into the other pillow, sharing this intimate space with him despite the awkwardness that had been plaguing them on and off the whole day. George reached out behind him and fumbled to turn out the lights. "You put your phone on charge, right?"

"I'm not stupid," he murmured as the switch found itself between his fingers and he clicked the lamp off, leaving only the thinnest slats of moonlight that worked their way through the blinds to bounce off of Dream's relaxing form.

"Didn't we just establish a zero IQ state?" His eyes are unreadable in this light, but his voice murmurs a smile into George's mind's eye.

"You did, maybe. If anyone has the brain cell around here, it's me."

"Well, can I have a turn some time?" Tommy's complaining flashed back into his mind and he stifled a quiet laugh. "What?"

"Nothing. Those kids were just... unforgettable, I reckon."

"Really? What happened?"

"I'll tell you the story on the drive home," he decided.

It was only a few minutes of comfortable silence later, Dream almost definitely drifting to sleep in front of him, that he realised he'd now set a very concrete and disconcerting timer on his own confession.

But even that unease faded in the face of soft pillows and the cool Mississippi night air and the presence of his best friend by his side, and when he focused on those smaller things sleep came much easier.

Honestly, he'd never slept better.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the "stealing from fasten your seatbelts" really jumped out at the end there ell em ay oh if you need your fix just go read the work this fic's inspired by

**Author's Note:**

> comment or i'm about to start stabbing shit


End file.
